Final Fantasy XIV’s healer problem and how it’s kind of unsolvable

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Originally Posted by Shofie

I am not a fan of the rhetoric that to be a "good" healer you have to DPS, because it applies the logic that a healer that is completely apt at healing is a "bad" healer, even if for some reason they do not or cannot DPS in addition to healing. In my opinion, a "good" healer is a healer who keeps their party in good health and within reason, alive.

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Keeping people alive doesnt mean you are a "good" healer. it doesnt even mean you are an "average" healer, its literally the bare minumum expected of a healer. its like saying a good tank is a tank that keeps aggro (and only that) and a good dps is one that meets dps checks and enrages by the skin of their teeth

there is also no such thing as being "completely apt at healing" when damage in normal content is so insanely low that healing is like 10% of all the casts you make. even the bottom of the barrel grey healers on fflogs spend less than 1/3rd of their casts actually healing. a good player, let alone a good healer, isnt someone who is just standing idly more than half of the time while everyone else carries them


and wether healer dps is needed or not, what people want is something to do during downtime. could you imagine spending 90% of a fight doing absolutely nothing? ive had runs of dungeons, extremes and even savage fights where both me and my cohealer havent needed to cast a single heal. in the entire instance, not 1 gcd heal.

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Originally Posted by Shofie

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Sigh,

A good healer balances both, period.
A bad healer only heals.
A bad healer only dpses.

Yoshi P's statement is outdated.

Content Design for Savage and Ultimates require healer dps as evidenced by Shiva Savage where if you take out both the healer dps from the best parse(do bare in mind at this stage they are most assuredly BiS no questions asked) they fail the dps check of the fight, that makes healer dps 100% factored into a fight design thus Yoshi P's statement is false now.

Content below Savage won't factor healer dps.

Good healers spend between 60%-90% using their gcd dps skills in current max level content, the best healers near 100% if not 100% is gcd dps.

Ogcds are plentiful, powerful and have short cds they are up for near everything even in Savage fights let alone below that.

Healers are being told to Dps because IT IS LAZY TO STAND THERE DOING NOTHING while waiting for someone to get enough ouchies that you need to gcd heal.

No other role gets this level of leeway and it is absurd healers think because i'm a healer I can be afk for over half my time, that is grade A manure from a skunk farm.

People want better downtime tools and the easiest path for SE to do that is to increase number of dps skills available, they could surprise us with a new system but then you have 80 levels where that new system means jack and dung because they have never balances old content with new job design, Rdm at low levels/healers design now/Gnb/ Smn at lv 70 etc etc etc.

Honestly would you not be upset if you saw a Drk only using Unleash and popping cds? Their doing their job but at such a bare minimum standard that it should not be tolerated, healers just standing there waiting for ouchies are that Drk.

Spending nearly 100% of your GCD on DPS skills is really why an overhaul on the role is necessary. To me you shouldn’t be spending more than half, but obviously the game isn’t designed that way. Just hope with the healer overhaul they get closer to that

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Originally Posted by MirronTulaxia

Spending nearly 100% of your GCD on DPS skills is really why an overhaul on the role is necessary. To me you shouldn’t be spending more than half, but obviously the game isn’t designed that way. Just hope with the healer overhaul they get closer to that

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That's not just a healer overhaul they'd need to do, they'd need to rework the entire game from ARR to now to change that. It's way easier to just make healers work in the current system than to try and change both healers and the system. Especially with things like Covid slowing progression down on top of all the things they have to add into a new expansion an overhaul of that level is not feasible, unless you want literally nothing else in 6.0.

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Originally Posted by Billythepancake

That's not just a healer overhaul they'd need to do, they'd need to rework the entire game from ARR to now to change that. It's way easier to just make healers work in the current system than to try and change both healers and the system. Especially with things like Covid slowing progression down on top of all the things they have to add into a new expansion an overhaul of that level is not feasible, unless you want literally nothing else in 6.0.

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I mean, I'd be content with them just changing it from the next expansion onwards, not really concerned with them reworking content.

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Originally Posted by MirronTulaxia

I mean, I'd be content with them just changing it from the next expansion onwards, not really concerned with them reworking content.

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Then you have classes that flat out don't work until level 80. Either that or they're stupid easy, and then as soon as 80 hits they're hit with a massive difficulty spike and playstyle shift they were not prepared for.

Plus, I LOVE that healers contribute to DPS. This is the only MMO I could get a character to max, because it's the only MMO where I felt like healing was an active part of the fight. Every other game it's "Stand in the back and kiss booboos away while everyone else gets to do all the cool fun flips and explosions". I fell in love with SCH because it was the closest thing to my healer/dps hybrid, and I will stand by that is way better design than just standing to the side and spamming heals.

Given that I didn't say "they only heal" it's not like I'm saying anything drastic. For something called a healer to have 100% of their GCD be not healing if you're playing it properly is absurd though. People tend to play healers because they like the things you're saying are bad, but if you want to play DPS there are three times as many DPS options as there are healer, not even counting that healers are fairly arguable in terms of that capacity to boot.

In terms of them making changes that make past content wonky it wouldn't be the first time so that's not really a big deal to me.

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Originally Posted by Shofie

I am not a fan of the rhetoric that to be a "good" healer you have to DPS, because it applies the logic that a healer that is completely apt at healing is a "bad" healer, even if for some reason they do not or cannot DPS in addition to healing. In my opinion, a "good" healer is a healer who keeps their party in good health and within reason, alive.

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I think you may be misunderstanding the rhetoric then.
High DPS isn't the cause of being a good healer, but rather the symptom of being a good healer.

Being good at healing in FFXIV is about ensuring that the party survives the encounter with the least resources used per instance of damage.
An inefficient healer, someone who spends too many resources per healing instance, will need to dip into GCD heals just for people to survive and so have lower DPS.
A good healer has more free time between damage instances, so they fill that time with DPSing.

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Originally Posted by Shofie

DPS, according to Yoshi-P, has NEVER been "required" to play the job endgame. No fights are tuned with healer's DPS in mind, a healer can refrain from DPSing and the fight is entirely clearable in spite of this--even endgame hardcore raid content. It will go faster if the healer joins in, but it is not ever mandatory.

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What Yoshi-P said was wrong. Pure and simple. TEA requires healer DPS to clear, Shiva requires healer DPS to clear. The only fights that don't require healer DPS are fights that you massively overgear, or don't have an enrage (so dungeons)

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Originally Posted by Shofie

But the attitude that healers must DPS or they are bad is a very toxic mindset, as evidenced by plenty of threads and players getting chuddy with people because they aren't DPSing, when in many cases, they healer simply can't do to some factor that the players either hadn't noticed, or simply hadn't thought of.

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Incoming damage in this game is moderate, but the frequency is very low. Healing damage is super easy, and with the low frequency someone not DPSing is likely standing around doing nothing.
Now if I was a DPS/Tank player trying my butt off to get full uptime while doing my rotation and mechanics, I would get annoyed at Mr Pureheal who is just standing around doing literally nothing between 30s raidwides and tank busters.

It's not fair that healers try to get a free pass for non-contribution, while if tanks or dps tried to do the same, they take the full brunt of criticism.

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Originally Posted by MirronTulaxia

Given that I didn't say "they only heal" it's not like I'm saying anything drastic. For something called a healer to have 100% of their GCD be not healing if you're playing it properly is absurd though. People tend to play healers because they like the things you're saying are bad, but if you want to play DPS there are three times as many DPS options as there are healer, not even counting that healers are fairly arguable in terms of that capacity to boot.

In terms of them making changes that make past content wonky it wouldn't be the first time so that's not really a big deal to me.

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Problem, how does SE change healer design to accommodate more healing gcds?

If they nerf or remove ogcd heals you then have issues with Ultimates where healers cannot do their function and require buffs thus gcds heals get reduced since ogcds become too powerful again.

Change content design? Bad idea because content would have to be designed HARDER THAN ULTIMATE to force more gcd heals which the playerbase certainly cannot handle XD.

Do both and you get what Billy says a difficulty spike not just for new healers but veterans as well most likely turning off even more healers.

They have designed themselves into a corner by chasing the healing focus gameplay, they should've from the beginning continued enhancing the hybrid style that was very unique to FFXIV as an MMO where wasn't just 1 healer but all healers that felt like a hybrid but in different unique ways.

We are in the current healer mess where Cure 1 and Benefic 1 are being considered button bloat because of healing focus gameplay, the very playstyle they want to enforce is being made redundant by itself.

One can only hope the developers realise this because they sure as heck ain't letting anyone know about taking in feedback from healers.

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Originally Posted by Crushnight

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Just randomize the fights. That's all I'm asking for anyway. It doesn't need to be "harder than Ultimate" at all, just make encounters not as predictable to deal with. I love the game but the encounters are my biggest criticism; healing should be the most dynamic and chaotic role that YOU rein in under control with skill but XIV just does it for you because the fights are the same every time you do them.

Look at Engels in the Copied Factory: start of the fight he ALWAYS opens with either an AoE on the left/right, then the other side then a tankbuster. Why not sometimes start with the tankbuster? Or have a chance that he'll use the tankbuster twice in a row? It doesn't make things more difficult but now you can't preplan every heal. Make us actually consider what abilities to use and when because you never know what to expect. Push our oGCD's from being our first line of healing to our emergency heal buttons that we want to save. Make use use our skills in clever ways to open up room for DPS. Have use make interesting decisions. Right now the only time I have interesting decisions to make are in dungeon trash pulls.

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Originally Posted by GrimGale

But we can't focus on healing. There is barely any healing to do!

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Indeed, that was never in question; as I said IMO it's all perception.

Shofie's post might indeed be the casual's view of what healers are expected to do. It's "nice" to contribute to DPS, but they're supposed to keep the team alive. Even if the team is not doing mechanics, it is the healer's job to babysit.

But for us who want to get better, who aren't just satisfied with merely keeping everyone alive, we all know that the true measure of skill in any role is how much your presence speeds an encounter up. This means healing is number one for healers, but the goal now shifts to do as much damage while keeping everyone alive. We want to be judged on this metric.

But causal players don't care, and may actively reject such a skill spectrum. And the problem is that SE is trying to please both the casual, who only play this game to chill, and the skill seeker, who aims to improve their play. It's why we have Ultimate, but the classic Tank Stance and Diversion are gone. It's why parsing is "don't ask, don't tell", even though it is technically against the TOS. But healing might not be able to make everyone happy. SE could be forced to make a hard choice with healer design. I just hope they remember that players who aim to improve also want to have fun doing it.

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Originally Posted by Shofie

DPS, according to Yoshi-P, has NEVER been "required" to play the job endgame. No fights are tuned with healer's DPS in mind , a healer can refrain from DPSing and the fight is entirely clearable in spite of this--even endgame hardcore raid content. It will go faster if the healer joins in, but it is not ever mandatory.

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This is either

1) An outdated quote

or

2) Yoshi doesn't understand the game the way it's currently designed.

Healer DPS is absolutely required at end game. Current Savage content is literally impossible to beat without it.

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Originally Posted by Crushnight

People want better downtime tools and the easiest path for SE to do that is to increase number of dps skills available, they could surprise us with a new system but then you have 80 levels where that new system means jack and dung because they have never balances old content with new job design, Rdm at low levels/healers design now/Gnb/ Smn at lv 70 etc etc etc.

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Quite honestly I'd even go so far as to accept the Buff / Debuff / Support role instead of pure dps during downtime. DPS is better than nothing but Support would play much better in the healing vein.

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Originally Posted by GucciSan

Just randomize the fights. That's all I'm asking for anyway. It doesn't need to be "harder than Ultimate" at all, just make encounters not as predictable to deal with. I love the game but the encounters are my biggest criticism; healing should be the most dynamic and chaotic role that YOU rein in under control with skill but XIV just does it for you because the fights are the same every time you do them.

Look at Engels in the Copied Factory: start of the fight he ALWAYS opens with either an AoE on the left/right, then the other side then a tankbuster. Why not sometimes start with the tankbuster? Or have a chance that he'll use the tankbuster twice in a row? It doesn't make things more difficult but now you can't preplan every heal. Make us actually consider what abilities to use and when because you never know what to expect. Push our oGCD's from being our first line of healing to our emergency heal buttons that we want to save. Make use use our skills in clever ways to open up room for DPS. Have use make interesting decisions. Right now the only time I have interesting decisions to make are in dungeon trash pulls.

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OK I like to direct you to a fight known as o10s for why making everything random would not work.

O10s has random tankbusters, it just led to frustration as it very well could decide 1 tank eat all of them in a fight and they run out of cds for them(this was still in SB so no idea how ShB tanks may handle it now) and they are eating it raw, this meant that healers had to adjust for this potential extra damage in any given run, O10s also had random nail spawns for add phase meaning no one could pre position so you immediately have to adjust positions accordingly after the fact. Tanks had no answer to this rng back in SB breeding frustration. Everyone lost uptime in this fight purely down to rng not just healers.

Rng in fights can work if not overdone Middy Savage was overdoing it and you want an entire expansion designed like it, tell you now bad idea, nothing kills enjoyment faster than working hard and rng goes and screws you over just look at Black Desert's enhancement process. Raiders in FFXIV would not take it kindly look at TEA's wormhole mechanic or remember Nisi and Royal pentacle, then what if only in dungeons/24 mans , well it spice it up but everything would have to have longer casts thus slowing fights down for the less skilled playerbase to handle the rng of mechanics, boring every none healer which would just be a bad move.

Then you have the last issue of 80 levels of scripted fights is then completely thrown out the window talk about wanting to add a difficulty spike in the extreme, you would drive away way more people than you want to, if there is one thing i've learned over the years playing FFXIV is the general community do not pay attention to what a boss is doing until it happens.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

Quite honestly I'd even go so far as to accept the Buff / Debuff / Support role instead of pure dps during downtime. DPS is better than nothing but Support would play much better in the healing vein.

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I would be all for a support heavy downtime had they not strip Ast of everything non dmg up, this card system change shows that SE cannot handle support role because the non dmg up buffs didn't suit their use despite many many Asts using them.

Let's face it for this community if it doesn't provide more dps than glare/malefic/broil it's worthless because Balance is king I'm sorry I mean damage is king >_>

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Originally Posted by Crushnight

I would be all for a support heavy downtime had they not strip Ast of everything non dmg up, this card system change shows that SE cannot handle support role because the non dmg up buffs didn't suit their use despite many many Asts using them.

Let's face it for this community if it doesn't provide more dps than glare/malefic/broil it's worthless because Balance is king I'm sorry I mean damage is king >_>

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I think the problem was they only had one healer that could properly support. Now, in the next expansion if they make a 2nd support style healer they can bring the cards back and have 2 "pure" healers and 2 "support" healers. Similar to MT / OT they were going for in ShB (they failed at it)

But if I was a developer and I had my way:

Remove support from DPS entirely. They need to focus on DPS.

Protect: Role Action Similar to what it did in pvp, gave a short Physical damage reduction on a relatively short CD.

Shell: Role Action Gives a short Magic Damage reduction on relatively short CD. Essentially what Apocatastasis used to do on BLM but to a target.

Eye for an Eye: Lowers target's strength and dexterity by 10%. (remove feint from physical DPS jobs)

Addle: Lowers target's intelligence and mind by 10% Remove from Magic DPS.

There, now every healer has proper support actions.

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Originally Posted by Shofie

To be clear here: I think healers should DPS if they're able to, and "able" is a really broad word here. Not every player is created the same, and some of us struggle with balancing healing with DPS on a lot of days, and that shouldn't be considered someone being a "bad healer" because they aren't DPSing "enough". But, if the party is doing mechanics well, and everyone's geared decently enough, and staying out of AOEs, and you find they don't need much attention...then yeah, throw some DPS out, hell yeah.

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I'm sorry but no. In this game you are a bad healer if you're aren't actively DPSing by level 60. There is simply no excuse. I can appreciate inexperienced healers being cautious at endgame, especially if they're attempted Savage for the first time. But even then, you can throw out Glare/Dia without any real difficulty. People took your DPS spells being apart of your kit because they are. Yoshida can say whatever he wants, however the game simply isn't designed in a manner where healers should only heal. Electing not to DPS means you're literally contributing nothing for a good portion of the encounter—likely more than half of it. This is why it irks other players so much, and why the current approach to healers is a failure.

No other job gets the luxury of being able to sit around waiting for damage to occur. Why should healers?

If the dev team does intend for healers to primarily focus on healing and only contribute minimal DPS then they need to either create fights where healing has a much strong focus or overhaul healers into a support-esque role so they have something besides damage to focus on during downtime. And yes, I'm aware increasing the healing requirements too much will hindrance the casual players. But even the average players are complaining nowadays due to how little they actually need to heal. That speaks volumes to how undertuned a lot of encounters are. So something has to bunch come 6.0.

I’m not sure I have any specific ideas for how they should raise the amount of healing. Any change inevitably will make things more difficult, but given they barely heal as is that’s to be expected. If the bulk of what they do is DPS with a dash of tossing a Lily out then it’s hardly surprising that things would be more difficult, they’re not playing Healers and then you ask them to do that.

So with a spike in difficulty being moot it’s just about making sure to change damage requirements so the DPS isn’t as necessary and upping the frequency of damage, possibly the amount. Maybe change mitigation amounts on tanks some too.

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Originally Posted by MirronTulaxia

I’m not sure I have any specific ideas for how they should raise the amount of healing. Any change inevitably will make things more difficult, but given they barely heal as is that’s to be expected. If the bulk of what they do is DPS with a dash of tossing a Lily out then it’s hardly surprising that things would be more difficult, they’re not playing Healers and then you ask them to do that.

So with a spike in difficulty being moot it’s just about making sure to change damage requirements so the DPS isn’t as necessary and upping the frequency of damage, possibly the amount. Maybe change mitigation amounts on tanks some too.

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Ultimates have a 30% heal rate. You want regular content to exceed that and be more difficult than ultimate? With the people I've played with, honestly, I'm surprised some of them can even tie their shoes. I'd hate to get stuck in a dungeon for MSQ progression because the game required actual competency from the healer. At least with EXs and Savage I can choose the dumb dumbs I'm stuck with, can't really do that with DF.

Obviously the mechanics wouldn't be as hard overall as ultimate, don't tell me that. But healing is a huge part of ultimate and it's all about managing resources. I cannot see the player base of this game genuinely making good use of their kits in required content. I'd much rather just be given more to do when there's no healing to do, it's easier to implement and more satisfying. I should feel rewarded for going the distance and learning to get better at my class, not feel punished because now I have nothing to do other than spam 1 button.

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Originally Posted by Billythepancake

Ultimates have a 30% heal rate. You want regular content to exceed that and be more difficult than ultimate? With the people I've played with, honestly, I'm surprised some of them can even tie their shoes. I'd hate to get stuck in a dungeon for MSQ progression because the game required actual competency from the healer. At least with EXs and Savage I can choose the dumb dumbs I'm stuck with, can't really do that with DF.

Obviously the mechanics wouldn't be as hard overall as ultimate, don't tell me that. But healing is a huge part of ultimate and it's all about managing resources. I cannot see the player base of this game genuinely making good use of their kits in required content. I'd much rather just be given more to do when there's no healing to do, it's easier to implement and more satisfying. I should feel rewarded for going the distance and learning to get better at my class, not feel punished because now I have nothing to do other than spam 1 button.

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I didn't say make it more difficult. More healing doesn't, to me, have to mean a difficulty spike.

That and I don't really see people as being that incompetent so much as they'll put forward the minimum effort needed to clear. Which is different from being unable to do harder things. Though being stuck in the MSQ isn't really possible with Trusts anymore either.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

I think the problem was they only had one healer that could properly support. Now, in the next expansion if they make a 2nd support style healer they can bring the cards back and have 2 "pure" healers and 2 "support" healers. Similar to MT / OT they were going for in ShB (they failed at it)

But if I was a developer and I had my way:

Remove support from DPS entirely. They need to focus on DPS.

Protect: Role Action Similar to what it did in pvp, gave a short Physical damage reduction on a relatively short CD.
Shell: Role Action Gives a short Magic Damage reduction on relatively short CD. Essentially what Apocatastasis used to do on BLM but to a target.
Eye for an Eye: Lowers target's strength and dexterity by 10%. (remove feint from physical DPS jobs)
Addle: Lowers target's intelligence and mind by 10% Remove from Magic DPS.

There, now every healer has proper support actions.

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That doesn't solve the 1 button spam as half of those are ogcds and the other half have to be so powerful that it brings a net gain on glares/broils/malefics or people will consider them worthless (which they wouldn't be just certain people will and if SE listens like they did with Ast they'll get axed) like people viewed Bole etc (which was plenty useful just offered less than Balance so it got axed much to mine and a few others annoyance).

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Originally Posted by GucciSan

Look at Engels in the Copied Factory: start of the fight he ALWAYS opens with either an AoE on the left/right, then the other side then a tankbuster. Why not sometimes start with the tankbuster? Or have a chance that he'll use the tankbuster twice in a row?

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It’s a way to introduce players to the tells of the encounter early on so it doesn’t catch them off-guard. Later on, the boss mixes the tells with other mechanics and the player has to figure out how they interact. Once you learn it though, it becomes repetitive, but will always be useful for players still learning. If the boss ends up spending the first 3 minutes of the encounter using only tank busters, then the fight is basically a training dummy at that point. He’ll transition into the add phase without ever using any of his other mechanics, and that sounds equally as boring.

There’s only so much encounter time you can allocate to randomness. Adding rules to the randomness makes the fight predictable again. If you want a prime example of a random fight, take a look at Urth’s Fount (Odin’s Trial).

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Originally Posted by MirronTulaxia

change damage requirements so the DPS isn’t as necessary

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We had this problem way back in ARR where with Healer DPS not being factored in at all caused fights to get steamrolled through with Healer DPS—allowing entire phases to get skipped. No matter how much you up the frequency of incoming damage, there will always be ways for Healers to optimise and create downtime for DPS. This may potentially cause the skill floor for healing to raise drastically which can potentially deter players from the role completely. It’s the same problem we have with the healer distribution as is. Ast requires significantly more effort to pull ahead or just match both Whm and Sch. After all, why play a role that needs three times the amount of attention and effort compared to the other roles?

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Originally Posted by AdamFyi

It’s a way to introduce players to the tells of the encounter early on so it doesn’t catch them off-guard. Later on, the boss mixes the tells with other mechanics and the player has to figure out how they interact. Once you learn it though, it becomes repetitive, but will always be useful for players still learning. If the boss ends up spending the first 3 minutes of the encounter using only tank busters, then the fight is basically a training dummy at that point. He’ll transition into the add phase without ever using any of his other mechanics, and that sounds equally as boring.

There’s only so much encounter time you can allocate to randomness. Adding rules to the randomness makes the fight predictable again. If you want a prime example of a random fight, take a look at Urth’s Fount (Odin’s Trial).

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I imagine they’d still have limiters on how often a mechanic can occur so this exact scenario doesn’t happen. Going back to the buster example, sometimes the boss opens the fight with one, but now there’s a percentage chance that they’ll do it twice in a row, but it caps at 2 so after that they’ll move on to a different mechanic and won’t use the buster again for a set time. You’d still see all the mechanics you’d need to they just wouldn’t happen in a specific order.

Is it totally random? No not really, but I think adding in some element of unpredictability would make encounters far more interesting than they are right now. The fact that I can know when I’m going to heal, and what exact oGCD button I’m gonna press at the specific point in the fight because the mechanics and my CDs align with each other screams a problem to me. It starts feeling like the fight is accommodating for me instead of me adjusting to it.

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Originally Posted by GucciSan

Is it totally random? No not really, but I think adding in some element of unpredictability would make encounters far more interesting than they are right now.

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Mhm. However, the problem is that you actually need something like 7 tank busters in a row to actually throw off cooldowns like that. There’s a wide array of powerful oGCD healing tools that a double buster every so often won’t really make a dent in anything. And if anything, most consecutive tank busters just get invulned anyway.

Are the oGCD healing tools the problem? No, they’re powerful enough so that they give healers more breathing room to work with. Having a wider array of strong options lowers the skill floor to accommodate more players of lower skill level.

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Originally Posted by GucciSan

It starts feeling like the fight is accommodating for me instead of me adjusting to it.

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Until I did a full HoH run, I never would have realized this. While the monsters in deep dungeons do have set rotations, the fact that so much random stuff could throw you off. Like, you may know that one monster will do a crazy thing in 20 seconds... So you focus it down. But what if another joins mid fight? Or maybe you fight an easier one, and then the crazy monster joins in? Or offscreen AoE blasts?

Deep Dungeon, in the fixed party only sections, actually try to *beat* you in the confines of its restrictions.

In comparison, most other content doesn't feel like that. They feel like they're *testing* you. A standardized test, if you will.

Maybe people like having a baseline - I can see DPS liking it, but I feel something is lost here.

Instead of turning into a DPS, once there is nothing to heal anymore, healers should get a lot more GCD Skills to buff Party Members or debuff the boss.
E.g. a buff that gives 10% more damage to a party member, but only lasts for 5 seconds and has a cast time of 2 seconds, something like that (needs to balanced though, to be more effective then doing damage on your own).
So you can re-buff selected party members when there is no time to heal, but you can't buff all party members all the time. It's a bit what the astrologian does with his cards.
Scholar could focus more on debuffing and dotting the boss, instead of spamming one damage skill, and whitemage could actually do damage on its own, but with some more interesting mechanics then we have now (spamming glare).

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Originally Posted by AdamFyi

It’s a way to introduce players to the tells of the encounter early on so it doesn’t catch them off-guard. Later on, the boss mixes the tells with other mechanics and the player has to figure out how they interact. Once you learn it though, it becomes repetitive, but will always be useful for players still learning. If the boss ends up spending the first 3 minutes of the encounter using only tank busters, then the fight is basically a training dummy at that point. He’ll transition into the add phase without ever using any of his other mechanics, and that sounds equally as boring.

There’s only so much encounter time you can allocate to randomness. Adding rules to the randomness makes the fight predictable again. If you want a prime example of a random fight, take a look at Urth’s Fount (Odin’s Trial).



We had this problem way back in ARR where with Healer DPS not being factored in at all caused fights to get steamrolled through with Healer DPS—allowing entire phases to get skipped. No matter how much you up the frequency of incoming damage, there will always be ways for Healers to optimise and create downtime for DPS. This may potentially cause the skill floor for healing to raise drastically which can potentially deter players from the role completely. It’s the same problem we have with the healer distribution as is. Ast requires significantly more effort to pull ahead or just match both Whm and Sch. After all, why play a role that needs three times the amount of attention and effort compared to the other roles?

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I did say “isn’t as necessary”, not remove it entirely. Alternatively to hear people talk about it we may as well do away with the role entirely. It really sounds like people think a proper healer is impossible in XIV, and if so we may as well go a GW2 route and just have everyone manage their own health/reviving and the like. As is the healing isn’t important enough.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

Protect: Role Action Similar to what it did in pvp, gave a short Physical damage reduction on a relatively short CD.

Shell: Role Action Gives a short Magic Damage reduction on relatively short CD. Essentially what Apocatastasis used to do on BLM but to a target.

Eye for an Eye: Lowers target's strength and dexterity by 10%. (remove feint from physical DPS jobs)

Addle: Lowers target's intelligence and mind by 10% Remove from Magic DPS.

There, now every healer has proper support actions.

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i actually would love to get mitigation back on healers. i cannot fathom why they removed it from healers (virus/e4e/disable) and gave it to dps in the first place.

yes, it doesn't entirely solve the 1 button spam issue but it still gives healers more things to do, which theyre desperately lacking

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Originally Posted by MirronTulaxia

I did say “isn’t as necessary”, not remove it entirely. Alternatively to hear people talk about it we may as well do away with the role entirely. It really sounds like people think a proper healer is impossible in XIV, and if so we may as well go a GW2 route and just have everyone manage their own health/reviving and the like. As is the healing isn’t important enough.

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This is my biggest fear come 6.0. That SE will hear that healers don't heal all that much now and don't want more involved healing and just scrap it altogether. Someone put it really well when they said that the game isn't designed for Healers or Tanks, but 8 DPS with defensive cooldowns. Give everyone a self sustain heal and a AoE heal like DNC and it wouldn't be much different.

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Originally Posted by GucciSan

This is my biggest fear come 6.0. That SE will hear that healers don't heal all that much now and don't want more involved healing and just scrap it altogether. Someone put it really well when they said that the game isn't designed for Healers or Tanks, but 8 DPS with defensive cooldowns. Give everyone a self sustain heal and a AoE heal like DNC and it wouldn't be much different.

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I doubt they will do that unless they get the chance to redesign most of the levelling content. While experienced players can handle this just fine, casuals would likely suffer, and we're in this situation in the first place due to an appeal to them.

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Originally Posted by GucciSan

This is my biggest fear come 6.0. That SE will hear that healers don't heal all that much now and don't want more involved healing and just scrap it altogether. Someone put it really well when they said that the game isn't designed for Healers or Tanks, but 8 DPS with defensive cooldowns. Give everyone a self sustain heal and a AoE heal like DNC and it wouldn't be much different.

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I mean as I said, if they want to call what we have "healing" where it's DPS with some odd responsibilities then we may as well remove the pretense of the job. Give everyone some self-healing, you take care of yourself and maybe some AoE stuff, and we can make the current Healers "Support". Though that'll just basically be DPS with some other buttons being pushed too so it's really just delaying the inevitable shift to everything being a DPS.

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Originally Posted by MirronTulaxia

I did say “isn’t as necessary”, not remove it entirely.

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That’s what I was responding to. Making it less necessary means that they’ll have to lower the dps checks to compensate. Which means a hole for the skilled healers to exploit that makes it possible to push dps thresholds, potentially causing even more focus on healer dps. They could also potentially move some of that damage into the DPS role instead, but that would mean rebalancing a lot of stuff which isn’t worth the time tbh.

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Originally Posted by MirronTulaxia

It really sounds like people think a proper healer is impossible in XIV

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It’s not that a “proper healer” is impossible, it’s “healer design from other games” the one that’s impossible to translate into XIV which is what a lot of people are always suggesting. I personally like how the healers function in XIV as is. It’s a lot more approachable and not as stressful as other MMOs, which I really appreciate. They could use some tweaks to their damage kits to make them more interesting than one dot and one nuke. Fix that and I’ll be satisfied.

I mean, again, DPS with some minor additional responsibilities is not a Healer. And there will always be options for more skilled players to exploit things. Though they could slow down the casting of the Glare-equivalent and increase it's MP cost too I suppose to discourage it.

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Originally Posted by MirronTulaxia

I mean, again, DPS with some minor additional responsibilities is not a Healer. And there will always be options for more skilled players to exploit things. Though they could slow down the casting of the Glare-equivalent and increase it's MP cost too I suppose to discourage it.

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I saw this and was like "nope". If the game defines it as a Healer, then it is a Healer. Just cause the game's interpretation of it doesn't match yours, doesn't mean that it isn't one. And honestly, discouraging dpsing when so many fights have significant amount of downtime is probably the worst possible thing to suggest lmao. Having healers sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for damage to pop out sounds like riveting gameplay.

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Originally Posted by MirronTulaxia

I mean, again, DPS with some minor additional responsibilities is not a Healer. And there will always be options for more skilled players to exploit things. Though they could slow down the casting of the Glare-equivalent and increase it's MP cost too I suppose to discourage it.

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See, this is what I don't like and I feel is where people can be narrowminded when it comes to games that use the triad of "healer, tank, DPS". Different games will approach how that triad works differently and not all of them will use the exact same philosophies and I don't like that people come to this game and then expect this game's philosophy to change. The game is designed to benefit from healer DPS, it encourages it and at the higher tiers of content, needs it. I joined this game happy with the design philosophy and fell in love with healing in this game and now in its current state is dull as heck.

And it was a design that I feel complements the series as a whole. Because Final Fantasy hasn't generally been so rigid in such clear cut opaque definitions. Generally in an FF title you will find times your party doesn't need healing, in that time your healer character will have other things to do. This is a philosophy true of their single player games and philosophy true of their MMO's.

I played SCH in XI as our static's main healer, that job was plenty complicated and had a LOT and I mean an awful lot to do in its downtime and had a lot of DPS abilities and probably the biggest ability pool in the game. Whilst XI is a wholly different game, I love that they retained the philosophy of giving you more to do in your downtime when you're not healing. And now it's dull as heck.

And honestly, for people who struggle to keep up with healing and DPS, personally, I don't mind if they sacrifice DPS or just DPS sub-optimally, just as long as they're not being lazy when everybody else isn't. In fairness, for a lot of content, DPS helps but is not required. I was the same when I was still new and newish to the game, once more became second nature, I appreciated that I had more I could be doing.

IMO, they had the balance right for DPS/Heals in ARR and HW. So no inevitable shifting to being DPS that has the odd bit of healing. After all, it is not how many DPS abilities you have that affects DPS focus it is the content and how well your healing spells handle it that affects your healing focus. By adding things to restrict DPS or make it less dynamic, it doesn't make you do more healing, it just makes you more bored.

Blue Mage with 4 healing spells and a butt load of DPS ones has more of a healing focus in healer stance than any real healing jobs.

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Originally Posted by MirronTulaxia

Though they could slow down the casting of the Glare-equivalent and increase it's MP cost too I suppose to discourage it.

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I'm curious, do you dislike the concept of ABC, or, Always Be Casting or something?

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Originally Posted by MirronTulaxia

I mean as I said, if they want to call what we have "healing" where it's DPS with some odd responsibilities then we may as well remove the pretense of the job. Give everyone some self-healing, you take care of yourself and maybe some AoE stuff, and we can make the current Healers "Support". Though that'll just basically be DPS with some other buttons being pushed too so it's really just delaying the inevitable shift to everything being a DPS.

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Another game I play DPS can drop significant DPS and resume tank duty. Tank also can drop significant defense to access DPS. Same goes for healer they can drop their healing abilities to greatly increase their DPS.

I believe SE tried similar approach with Cleric / Tank stance and not worked out they removed all of it.

There are still things they should do to keep healers busy outside of spamming 2 DPS skills.

- Removing DoTs: I cant remember the last time I used Esuna. Why?
- Increase burst damage phases. Force us to burn on cooldowns so we need to use more GCD healing.
- Damage by heals. More enemies should required healing to die. Like undead enemies. Make us use our healing skills for offense like in Shinryu.
- Give us more lower potency dots so we need to juggle more dot ticks (remember when SCH had 3 or 4 dots?)
- Make us interact with things on the area

There are a lot of things they can do.

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Originally Posted by Irenia

I'm curious, do you dislike the concept of ABC, or, Always Be Casting or something?

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Given I didn't say anything about lessening the amount of actions a Healer performs but instead was about changing the category of actions a Healer performs (or more accurately the ratio) I'm not... even remotely sure how you got that from what I said. My guess is that you read it as "so then they'll do nothing in the downtime" when my idea is more they'll be doing something other than DPS. Ideally more healing, or if we really can't somehow make healing regular enough then we could do support I suppose, but I think people honestly just don't even want to contemplate it as opposed to it being "impossible".

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Originally Posted by MirronTulaxia

Given I didn't say anything about lessening the amount of actions a Healer performs but instead was about changing the category of actions a Healer performs (or more accurately the ratio) I'm not... even remotely sure how you got that from what I said. My guess is that you read it as "so then they'll do nothing in the downtime" when my idea is more they'll be doing something other than DPS. Ideally more healing, or if we really can't somehow make healing regular enough then we could do support I suppose, but I think people honestly just don't even want to contemplate it as opposed to it being "impossible".

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I think the reason why SE hasn't given healers more support skills is their fear of stressing out casuals for having too much to do.

Remember that they're trying to make healers and tanks more accessible to the general crowd (a.k.a non-healer oriented minds), so having too much to do (even if our downtime is just spamming) would scare away people or turn them away.

Just look at tanks, GNB is just a DPS with a tank icon. It feels so much like a DPS in a lot of aspects. And even Warrior felt this way before with the Fell Cleave spam.

Adding more complex abilities to their kits is not what SE wants. They want healers to be "pick up and learn quickly."

Ex. My roommate just got into FFXIV and wanted to play healer for shorter queues but was turned off because healer was "too much." The irony is that I was trying to help him and still he found it too stressful and he isn't the first person that felt this way. It's sad because I can only imagine how turned off the role seems to outsiders even if it's already dumbed down.

With that SE doesn't want healers to be more complex. Maybe AST will stay complex but even then, the cards have already been dumbed down. I wouldn't be surprised if they just removed cards entirely or reduce it to Lord/Lady for the sake of ease of access.

The best we could hope is that the 4th addition of (the same WHM copy jokingly or not) healer job will help diversify their constant need to nerf AST and overbuff it over the expansions. Someone said this before but AST's problem is that it's a filler for WHM or SCH which means it either performs better or worse, there's no inbetween. And as we've experienced with time, AST's been buffed to heaven and high to in order for people to want to play it.

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Originally Posted by Saefinn

I played SCH in XI as our static's main healer, that job was plenty complicated and had a LOT and I mean an awful lot to do in its downtime and had a lot of DPS abilities and probably the biggest ability pool in the game. Whilst XI is a wholly different game, I love that they retained the philosophy of giving you more to do in your downtime when you're not healing. And now it's dull as heck.

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It's interesting that you bring up XI. While I did not play SCH in that game, I did spend an enormous amount of time healing on my WHM and RDM. Red Mage in particular I would like to focus on because it is an example that SE has a history of taking away engaging gameplay for healers and dumbing them down gradually over time to only needing to execute a few skills in order to contribute to a party. It is also a job that in its prime, I felt played very closely to SCH in XIV during its prime back in 3.0, which was a huge reason why it is my first and still my go to job for all content. As such, I am more inclined to compare the gameplay of RDM in XI to SCH in XIV; while from what I know about SCH in XI seems more like a distant cousin to BLM in this game.

While RDM didn't have its skills pruned per say, it did suffer from a large part of its skillset becoming redundant, and its simplification is what ultimately caused me to leave the game. I think this is a big reason why I haven't been affected as greatly as other SCH mains because I have already been conditioned and come to expect this kind of treatment from SE towards its healers.

I have a greater amount of history and investment towards XIV now, but I would take healing in XIV over healing in XI any day of the week with the last impression that game left me with. Encounter design in XI is far different that XIV though, so while I do know where you are coming from, it is a difficult comparison to make. Ultimately, I know your point is you would like for more engaging gameplay as a healer, but just find it odd that you seem to prefer XI healing over XIV when I found the former to be even more dull.