Healers need an overhaul

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Originally Posted by TheMightyMollusk

It might also help if tanks weren't so overpowered that you barely NEED a healer. Or don't need one at all for a half-decent warrior.

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Between the ridiculous self sustain tanks have, the refusal to add/increase dps to healers, the lack of consistent healing needed in most content, and homogenization/simplification for the sake of "accessibility", I can only but assume the devs really, really patronize the healing role, almost as if they're not even catering to players, but people who want to go through the content with as minimal effort as possible. They insist in referring to them as casuals, but we know the proper term for that kind of people.

At this point why? We damn near no longer need healers. I'm actually waiting for no healer EX clears and I'm sure there'll be some mad lads who attempt Savage and Ult no healers.

Actually, that would be a great wake up call for Yoshi and Co. to clear their hardest content with no healers and then turn to them saying "What was that about healers needing to play harder content for more engagement?"

Savage Pandaemonium all WARs.

I'd like more involved DPS. Or more involved healing. Or more involved buffs. Or move involved SOMETHING. Jesus Christ, anything that doesn't feel like every fight is a QTE.

I feel like they've made healers easier in the wrong ways. Like for a mid-tier player getting into EX, the ShB changes were good in theory: Make healer DPS more consistent (to hit those incredibly tough DPS checks \s), and provide tons of healing tools so you can't run out no matter how inefficient you are. But that reasoning doesn't make sense unless you're looking at incredibly specific scenarios. Meanwhile, for veteran players it's just more boring, and for complete newbs it doesn't help at all.

If the goal was to make healing more approachable for novices, then they should have made it less punishing. For example, currently, the worst experience for a new player is going into a dungeon, dying to a mechanic they've never seen before, and causing a wipe because they were the healer and nobody could raise them. Why is the healer role the only one that causes wipes by dying in normal content? One thing I loved about TERA (R.I.P.) was that you got 5 free self-resses when you were new to a dungeon, so you had a chance to learn the bosses' attack patterns without wiping. FFXIV could do something similar, or just allow DPS to use Phoenix downs on the healer (slow, annoying, and potentially limited, but it keeps the run going).

Also, because -avoidable- damage is so high (and it gets worse as people take more vuln stacks), healers are heavily taxed by other people's mistakes, and that becomes the central role of a healer: be ready for other people to fuck up. Which is not only stressful for newbie healers, but it's incredibly boring for veteran healers when mistakes don't happen. What if healing were more consistent? Less punishing for other people's mistakes, and a bit higher or more frequent at a base level. Like why are wall-to-wall pulls the only time when single-target heals are needed in a good party? Healers basically have to learn 3 different modes of gameplay: DPS, scripted healing, and panic healing. It's pretty obvious which one is going to be most problematic for newbies, and conversely the least interesting for veterans. Cut that one down a bit (just a small bit), so the others can be increased.

Lastly, I don't know if anything can be done about this, but the simple act of switching targets to heal can be difficult for newbie healers (especially on controller?). Maybe if you cast a single-target heal while targeting an enemy it should go to the tank by default instead of yourself? Idk. (Not sarcastic, I just haven't though about this one as much, so I'm not sure something like that that would be doable or helpful.)

These are just a few systemic things that I think SQEX should be looking at if they actually want to lower the barrier-to-entry for healers. Streamlining the DPS kits just made it easier for mediocre players to beat enrage checks, which I guess is good for EX/Savage PF, but less fun for veterans.

There are other important perspectives, and I'm not at all a newbie healer myself, but those are the things I would look at to fulfill SQEX's goal of making the healer role more accessible. And since that would make healers less punishing for newbies even when they use only the most basic abilities, SQEX can then make the rest of the kit more complex and interesting for the rest of us without fear, right?

I know some people would prefer for there to be less focus on scripted healing, and instead have some built-in random-ish heal checks. Something that requires quick thinking or contingencies, but doesn't rely on people making mistakes. But SQEX would have to be incredibly careful with that, to avoid the possibility of random damage combining with mistake damage to instantly kill someone. That's just doesn't feel fair, as most one-shot mechanics have extra obvious telegraphs. It's still a worthwhile possibility though.

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Originally Posted by Grann-Goro

Here I present you the new healer tutorial in FFXIV :


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlc-...4M_18NhpPR3ojs

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woah man, not everyone is an elite healer. think of the sprouts

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Originally Posted by Leonerdo

I feel like they've made healers easier in the wrong ways.

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Tell me about it.

Removed skills that actually made Healing easier (Divine Seal, Eye for an Eye, Virus, Disable, etc)
Level locked the majority of your important healing skills until higher levels (Temperance, Rapture, Seraph, Neutral Sect, Celestial Intersection, etc.)
Removal of DPS tools that made dungeons easier by virtue of killing things quicker (AoE DoTs like Aero 3, Shadowflare and Bane).

They didn't make healing easier at all. They made it tedious and boring. Leveling a WHM from 1-50 in ARR and 1-50 now is an entirely different beast in the worst kind of way. You no longer have skills like Stoneskin and Divine Seal that actually made healing a LOT easier since you could prebuff the party with Stoneskin and Divine Seal made your heals powerful enough to actually matter. Nowadays though, the level 1-50 grind is so easy, you don't even HAVE to heal at all. The potency of your attacks, the lackluster damage enemies deal, etc. have made it so that people going into the role are so horribly unprepared that when shit hits the fan, they don't know what to do because their level experience was easy until that point and they never had to learn their job. While the reworking of ARR content has added back some of the old difficulty curve (at least from what I've seen with the reworks of MSQ dungeons actually having mechanics now), the jobs themselves are still horribly lacking for moments that require some level of effort to get thru.

If they want to make Healing more accessible, fine but at least do it properly and not just make low level content so easy that people never get a good feel for the job.

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Originally Posted by Grann-Goro

Here I present you the new healer tutorial in FFXIV :


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlc-...4M_18NhpPR3ojs

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Its painful to watch..... How can the devs not see what they have done wrong with healer design.

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Originally Posted by Grann-Goro

Here I present you the new healer tutorial in FFXIV :


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlc-...4M_18NhpPR3ojs

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woof... at least it's honest. they're telling you you're unnecessary and you can read it loud and clear. "just go play dps" you hear them hissing

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Originally Posted by Loonies

If there is not much to heal in ultimate, why we do not see a lot of groups there without healer and just use self heal or heal pots? For me in the normal dungeons there is enough to heal and the small dmg i do as a healer is good enough with the 3 dmg spells, no button bloat needed here.
And yes if i like to do more dmg then i play dps.

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You can clear dungeon without GCD heals. Get better

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Originally Posted by Ashpd

You can clear dungeon without GCD heals. Get better

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Why? May as well play however you want since it ultimately doesn't matter. Why tell people how to better make a boring task more boring? Let em heal how they want.