Make healers DPS with four or five healing actions

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Banriikku

If you want to play DPS with healing options please play not FF14 and make use of the trinity.

---

Isn't this exactly what healers boil down to though? Your class fantasy might differ, but when you look at the cold hard numbers, we are a DPS role in disguise and the key point here is that we are a terrible one at that.

FFXIV makes a mockery of the trinity right now, that much is undeniable. You can clear surprising amounts of content whilst completely skipping out of an entire role.

Compare that to FFXI where a typical team looking to grind exp or merits needs all 3 corners of the trinity to be at all viable. No tank? One single mob is going to tear your group to bits. No DPS? You're not killing anything anytime soon. No healer? You might be able to kill something with a little luck, but you're going to be sat for 5 minutes afterwards.

The most fun I've had healing in FFXIV in recent years has been when I'm not on a healer and as such have a dramatically weaker or more limited kit that I have to use with caution and thought. Thus why I agree with the sentiment of this thread. Strip our healing kit right back so that we actually have to think about how we apply it rather than just being able to endlessly Medica II the bad away.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Toutatis

Personally, I’d rather see healers having to use a wider array of healing abilities, have the game throw more punishing debuffs and dots that require actions from the healers, even in casual content.

---

Bring it! But that said... how interesting and involved can you make that all when there are only three damage types?

When I first started playing FFXIV, I was kind of expecting to find elemental damage (ice, fire, wind, earth, water, etc.), maybe slashing damage, maybe piercing damage, so on and so forth. Alas, it was not the case.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Sebazy

Compare that to FFXI where a typical team looking to grind exp or merits needs all 3 corners of the trinity to be at all viable. No tank? One single mob is going to tear your group to bits. No DPS? You're not killing anything anytime soon. No healer? You might be able to kill something with a little luck, but you're going to be sat for 5 minutes afterwards.

---

Is that necessarily better, though? Granted, that may be an unnecessary extreme, but I much prefer when you actually can flex roles somewhat.

I like the actual Arms, Fury, Combat/Outlaw, Feral, Ret, Frost, etc., tanking utility/swaps from "DPS" specs, and tanks occasionally being able to drop some defense and go ham against suppressed enemies.

I like healers having a sort of dance in play with tanks where their combined output is far higher if they're each aware of when the other one wants to be free to hit their big damage buttons at full effect and can sync their other outputs around that. I like the occasional bit of damage being worth standing in for uptime, given sufficient awareness of your healer's free resources at that moment and incoming healing needs.

In other games, I like not necessarily needing a tank to take on a boss, though for that to be of interest in XIV, we'd need some way for DPS to hand off threat to, and take it from, one another.

I just dislike that (A) that the dispensability of roles is so uneven (only healers are fully able to be dispensed with) and (B) that the process of flexing those roles scarcely even creates any new gameplay.

Imagine, for instance, some manner of Savage Dungeons. Even there, I'd say... let me go without a tank in an extremely coordinated group, but it should definitely be far harder (far more responsibilities demanded of each player), with only said really solid team having any chance of beating the with-tank time on the likes of a Savage dungeon. In those settings, let me go without a healer, too, but there should then absolutely be downtime melee have to face, and additional tank and raidwide damage as a result of lost suppression from melee, such that each fight is a spicy race against time, in order not to die despite the lack of healer. Let me go without any DPS, but ramping damage from certain mobs should make that have plenty of risk, too, between newly enabled full pulls to try to make back some of that time. Those odd comps should approach the content noticeably differently, rather than just hitting their utility CDs basically on CD and that's it.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by AmiableApkallu

Bring it! But that said... how interesting and involved can you make that all when there are only three damage types?

When I first started playing FFXIV, I was kind of expecting to find elemental damage (ice, fire, wind, earth, water, etc.), maybe slashing damage, maybe piercing damage, so on and so forth. Alas, it was not the case.

---

I mean, we say there are three, but in effect, there's almost... less than one, in terms of interaction, especially given that only tanks have anything sensitive to physical/magical distinctions.

If it's physical, healers can affect it. If it's magical, healers can affect it identically. If it's "true"/"darkness" damage, then there's no gameplay available anyhow, since it can't be affected. So not only are there no distinctions in one's agency/gameplay (between manner A and manner B), but there might not even be agency/gameplay at all.

That's not to say I want otherwise identical barriers/mitigation that are split into "physical" and "magical" in the way that RDM is broken into (on-paper only) distinctions between "black mana" and "white mana", of course, but if, say, each had an actual undermechanic that could synergize with other effects (think "Stagger" from physical damage, "Suppression" from magical damage, etc.), then we might actually have something, even if just from those two types.

Ruin could supply both Stagger and Suppression, Broil [not just an upgrade, presumably, in this system] pure magical (and convert suppression into further burst damage); Stone would could supply hefty Stagger, while Glare and Aero would provide both, but to a lesser effect each, and Dia pure suppression; etc., etc. Add in some further control over damage dynamics so that healers could have more frequent but costly access to nukes and voila, you've wrapped in some support gameplay just off those two types of damage... even just from purely offensive sources.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Connor

Not to muddy the waters, but I still think a healer job that predominantly buffs/debuffs through gcds would be super fun. I’d rather have limited healing options but lots of buffs/debuff, than a job that was a powerful healer or had powerful dps skills

---

Same.

Been thinking forever that AST would be more fun to me if it just dropped the Malific spam (used for soloing) and went ham on Cards. All Cards being GCDs but not having a CD so AST is just about constantly rolling buffs across the party and healing as necessary in between. It wouldn't be current AST, though, so I don't often suggest it because AST is the one healer I don't play and I don't want to rob the people who DO enjoy it of their gameplay. But if there was a way to make a healer that worked that way as a full time buffer/healer instead of support/dps, I think that would be a lot more fun.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Banriikku

Word.
But thats still not my point i want a healer support. BTW.: Why do any of you assume i dont want to DPS? Thats a hot take, i am a Lala i need some damage numbers in my fights even it means freindly fire.

---

It's a strawman people like to use against people that don't want healers turned into DPS Jobs with support heals only. "You don't want an involved DPS rotation? Obviously that means you don't want any dps buttons at all, right?!" It's such a ridiculous strawman, but gets trotted out and beaten to pulp all the time these days.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by TheDustyOne

Also we were definitely green DPS back in HW, what with Alexander having strict enrages that forced healers to DPS, as well as SCH just doing absurd damage in dungeons, Holy stun still being a thing that made mincemeat of large groups, etc. We just had a better balance of healing requirements and DPS engagement during downtime.

---

Part of this is a semantics argument (is "green DPS" defined as "has a DPS rotation" or "presses even one damage button during an encounter"?), but part of it seems to be a lot of people who played SCH in HW and think that was the way all healers played.

SCH from early on (even ARR, I'd say) was a Support/DPS instead of an outright Healer. Think about how it worked. Lustrate was a flat 25% heal back then, so Cleric Stance didn't reduce it. Sacred Soil was a flat percentage damage reduction, so again, Cleric didn't affect it. And SCH could Cross-Class additional things like Aero and Blizzard 2 to give it even more damage skills that it didn't natively have (WHM could not Cross-Class Bio or Miasma and Holy was already a better Blizzard 2). As a result, SCH gameplay was typically not about Cleric Stance dancing dynamically between being a healer and being a DPSer. In practice, it activated Cleric and stayed in Cleric all the time, managing DoTs, using oGCDs that boosted its output, and spot healing with Lustrate (which ignored Cleric) and Soil mitigation, only dropping out of Cleric if it needed to cast a big shield on a tank/party member.

CONVERSELY, WHM has always been much like it is today. Only in 2.0 did it have Thunder. From 2.1 to 3.0, it had two DoTs (Aero 1 and 2) and Stonespam. It also didn't employ Cleric Stance as much (it might dip into it to apply the DoTs before coming out of it again), and a lot of parties used their WHM as "main healer" with most of the healing responsibilities as this was seen as the most efficient gameplay. MP was more limited at the time AND damage spells cost more, so WHMs would often cost few damage spells and instead maintain HoT uptime (back then, HoTs had longer durations and so were the thing more as an upkeep where we now do that with our DoTs). Stoneskin was a GCD cast spell which WHMs also made frequent use of as their tankbuster protection spell like we'd use Benison (oGCD weave between Glares) now. Fluid Aura wasn't used in most combat because it would throw things around and could cause wipes or cleaves. In HW, WHM gained Tetra, Assize, Asylum, and Aero 3.

In effect, in ARR, WHM was a main healer while SCH was a support DPS.

And the beauty of it was: THIS WORKED really well. The people that like being a support DPS with healing options loved the absolute hell out of SCH, and the people who liked being a full time healer loved the hell out of WHM.

HW broke everything.

SCH became insanely OP and has been part of the meta comp from then to the present in basically every tier. AST was released horribly underpowered and blacklisted until it was buffed through the roof, to the point WHM became the underpowered one and remained so until basically 5.0. HW was the worst expansion in the game's history in terms of balance, and for Healers this was as apparent as anywhere.

...but I guess my point here is, people remember what SCH was and tend to think that was how all healers were played...but it really wasn't. And WHM was in a bad way from around 3.2 to 5.0, with modern ShB and EW WHM being far better than SB and HW WHM was. But healers were not viewed as support/DPS or green DPS at the time, at least WHM wasn't. And when the argument picked up in HW, it became so divisive that the Devs just outright deleted Cleric Stance because of all the fighting it was causing in the community.

Then there are those of us who didn't like SCH's playstyle at the time and avoided it by playing WHM, who have always been mainline healers instead of supports, that are agitated at people trying to shoehorn the role into being "Support" instead of "Healer".

Personally, I wouldn't mind them making a formal Support role (maybe yellow icons?) as there are plenty of Jobs that could fit in such a category (RDM, DNC, BRD jump out right away), but trying to force all healers into that is wrong. I also don't mind "sharing" the Healer role with Supporters, which is what we did in ARR with WHM (Healer) and SCH (Support).

But we need to start being honest about that being what is being discussed. As long as people insist it isn't, we can't really make any headway.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Renathras

HW broke everything.

SCH became insanely OP

---

Here's an old school spicy take:

SCH was always wildly OP throughout ARR, people were just blinded by Selene's seemingly huge but actually nigh useless haste buffs and didn't realise just how incredibly powerful Rouse+Whispering dawn was in enabling SCH to use it's superior MP economy for extra damage that WHM couldn't hope to compete with.

I literally sat entire instances in Cleric on SCH back in ARR because I could hammer enough HPS out of EoS and focus it where it was needed.

SCH was every bit as much of a healer as WHM was and in some cases had quite a clear advantage thanks to all the infirmity debuffs ARR used to throw around. Was it really a 'support DPS' when it was every bit as potent a healer as WHM was in reality? IMO I think it was just the superior job of the two with vastly more room for the top tier healers to really shine on it vs WHM that was forever having to pump the brakes.

The bigger problem for WHM in HW was that ARR added competition for the second slot, gone was the superstar SCH and it's mandatory comfort blanket pick up the pieces, now WHM actually had to earn it's raid spot and it was only a matter of time before it basically defaulted on that. Couple that with SE's then complete ignorance and lack of understanding towards healers back then and it was never going to go well IMO. SE just really didn't understand healers properly at that point.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Is that necessarily better, though? Granted, that may be an unnecessary extreme, but I much prefer when you actually can flex roles somewhat.

---

Aye, FFXI took it to too much of an extreme really. Having to sit in Jeuno because you didn't have the buffer necessary to enable your DPS to actually hit your target mobs was a prime example of things being taken too far.

WoW and Everquest 1 struck the balance just about right IMO. You could do group content whilst missing a part of the team but it was typically clearly subpar and a hinderance to do so.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Sebazy

Here's an old school spicy take:

SCH was always wildly OP throughout ARR, people were just blinded by Selene's seemingly huge but actually nigh useless haste buffs and didn't realise just how incredibly powerful Rouse+Whispering dawn was in enabling SCH to use it's superior MP economy for extra damage that WHM couldn't hope to compete with.

I literally sat entire instances in Cleric on SCH back in ARR because I could hammer enough HPS out of EoS and focus it where it was needed.

SCH was every bit as much of a healer as WHM was and in some cases had quite a clear advantage thanks to all the infirmity debuffs ARR used to throw around. Was it really a 'support DPS' when it was every bit as potent a healer as WHM was in reality? IMO I think it was just the superior job of the two with vastly more room for the top tier healers to really shine on it vs WHM that was forever having to pump the brakes.

The bigger problem for WHM in HW was that ARR added competition for the second slot, gone was the superstar SCH and it's mandatory comfort blanket pick up the pieces, now WHM actually had to earn it's raid spot and it was only a matter of time before it basically defaulted on that. Couple that with SE's then complete ignorance and lack of understanding towards healers back then and it was never going to go well IMO. SE just really didn't understand healers properly at that point.

---

White Mage has always been lacking any sort of defining qualities, even during ARR. Having Medica II and Cure III was a solid perk to White Mage where Scholar only had Succor as a source of accessible AoE healing for pinch situations. But offensively, it has always lacked its own direction. You had Scholar's DoT focused gameplay, and White Mage's "Scholar, but less" rather than adopting its own direction. And although it had stronger burst healing potential, its MP economy was horrendous compared to Scholar.

Scholar had Aetherflow, a 60 second cooldown that restored 20% of their maximum MP plus any additional MP gained through Energy Drain, of which you could use 3 of per minute. Note that back then, Ruin was 80 potency while Energy Drain was 150, so ARR Scholar actually had the reverse situation that it currently has, where you'd rather use Adlo, Succor, or Physick to heal with rather than Lustrate unless absolutely necessary because ED was a bigger loss, on top of the MP it would provide. That really puts into perspective how much of a joke Sacred Soil was back then.

Meanwhile White Mage had Shroud of Saints, a 180 second cooldown. It was only marginally stronger than current Lucid Dreaming (80 potency over 15 seconds compared to LD's 55 potency over 21 seconds), but at triple the cooldown. And that was it. That was an era where Ethers were often essential in harder content, something a lot of healers probably don't even realize exist.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by ty_taurus

White Mage has always been lacking any sort of defining qualities, even during ARR. Having Medica II and Cure III was a solid perk to White Mage where Scholar only had Succor as a source of accessible AoE healing for pinch situations. But offensively, it has always lacked its own direction.

---

Holy should have been it's clear standout but SE bottled it.

It makes me wonder about how useful SE's own metrics and data gathering were on player throughput actually. They clearly saw SCH's damage potential thus Yoshida's infamous quote, but it makes me wonder if they actually had any clue how much healing was being done at the same time.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Sebazy

Holy should have been it's clear standout but SE bottled it.

It makes me wonder about how useful SE's own metrics and data gathering were on player throughput actually. They clearly saw SCH's damage potential thus Yoshida's infamous quote, but it makes me wonder if they actually had any clue how much healing was being done at the same time.

---

Truthfully, I don't think the design team has a strong enough understanding of how healing actually works. It's been stated that the existence of FFlogs has brought to light metrics that even they weren't aware of, and that they have actually used that information to take into account changes. So I really don't doubt that they probably never had a way to measure healing throughput or even damage prevented metrics, and only looked at the surface level gameplay of Scholars casting heals infrequently while White Mages casted heals more frequently. It's actually really disheartened to know that role-defining changes very likely occurred as a result of misinformation, and something that they likely never really thought much about because it isn't in their comfort zones.

I am not a fan of turning the healers into Dps, but I do understand that there is a lot of downtime for the healers with experience.

Simple solution would be to make healing more difficult, remove mana regen in combat, make enemies hit harder en remove options like being able to use ress spells in combat.

Less "simple solution" and more "utter frustration and makes us sitting ducks with no mana and dead teammates".

I'd be fine with harder hitting enemies, but could you imagine a new player in that environment where they'd be too scared to even attack because of MP running out? Or even the capability to save a run because Raise is now button bloat? Never mind that we'd have to potentially nerf pretty much all EX and Savage bosses health to account for healers not being able to attack because of their lack of MP recovery. That's not a "simple solution".

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Laerune

I am not a fan of turning the healers into Dps, but I do understand that there is a lot of downtime for the healers with experience.

Simple solution would be to make healing more difficult, remove mana regen in combat, make enemies hit harder en remove options like being able to use ress spells in combat.

---

Removing MP regen in combat just adds idle time to fights, it doesn't make healing more difficult or more engaging. Removing combat res just makes dying more punishing, it does nothing to make healing more interesting or more difficult.

In fairness, I don’t think increasing the difficulty or cost of mid combat resses is a bad idea, there’s defo a case to be made that the lack of risk in mainstream combat further compounds the impact of a lack of actual healing requirements. Force healers to be more cautious. The issue with that of course is that it doesn’t really work well with the current emphasis on body checks in high end content.

If these mythical ‘new players’ are so completely incompetent in their understanding of tooltips that literally struggle with the tiniest bit of healing requirements are as common as everyone in the forums like to say, doesn’t that make current design literal perfection ?

Can’t fail healing because any button is the right one, can’t fail dps because any dps button is the right one (because there’s only 2). MP management is non-existent, healer dps variation still exists as a means of skill expression (a bad one), it’s not like literally every healer playing is scoring 100/100 effortlessly.

I mean, assuming Jimmy NoFriends is a new player and literally 1 HP more healing is going to make him freak the hell out and start randomly mashing his heal abilities off-cool-down until something happens. how do we justify giving that player even more dps options when they supposedly can’t deal with any kind of healing beyond the most simplistic and easily-resolved mechanics imaginable.


I mean, Jimmy NoFriends is (apparently) so dumb that it’s not fair to increase healing requirements at all or he’ll never clear content again. But we can overload his kit with a bunch of DoTs, DPS interactions, mechanics, optimisations, etc, and that’s totally fine. Not gonna overwhelm him at all, having all these damage-based mechanics and abilities on his job when he thinks he’s going to play a healer. You can make your ‘ but he can just be scum and not hit his damage buttons, it’s ok, we’ll just write about him in tales of D.F argument but we’ve already established he’s a new, incompetent player who can’t figure out things on his own .

What makes you think he’s going to go to the forums, open up the healer section, read that people think lower dps amounts are acceptable on healers (do they?), and suddenly adjust his entire playstyle to maximise healing, manage his full dps kit and have the wherewithal to understand the interactions between the two.

I just don’t understand how we can reconcile that ‘new players can’t handle any more healing’ but ‘new players can handle plenty additional damage options’. Either they’re smart enough to adapt to new abilities or they’re too unskilled for those options to ever be increased in the future without ‘massively impacting’ their ‘enjoyment of the game’ or w/e. I don’t understand how the former can be true without the latter becoming false

I’m pretty sure we’ve had people moaning about Harrowing Hell though? Which isn’t even that steep a check tbh.

The key thing is that failing to keep up damage output isn’t a problem for a casual player in casual content. However failing to keep up with healing is a very real problem. And then of course we have this game’s wild aversion to wipes

The biggest difference between "increase of healing required" and "increase of damage kit complexity" is that not properly engaging with the former will result in a wipe, not properly engaging with the latter will never cause a wipe in regular content.

We all were new players once. Back when I was new, I didn't press my damage buttons much at all, I never caught any flak for it. Even now, people rarely blame the healer for not doing enough damage even if boss enrages. What people do blame healers for though, is when dying to unavoidable damage, a big part of why Abyssos was so frustrating for healers is because healers get blamed for deaths even when it's the tanks and DPS that didn't press their mitigation buttons.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Sebazy

I’m pretty sure we’ve had people moaning about Harrowing Hell though? Which isn’t even that steep a check tbh.

The key thing is that failing to keep up damage output isn’t a problem for a casual player in casual content. However failing to keep up with healing is a very real problem. And then of course we have this game’s wild aversion to wipes

---

Did we? I saw that one person saying it was an issue, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else say it was something ‘too difficult’. I’ve not had any party wipes to it that I can think of either, and while I do generally play healer myself anyway, but I never felt like the Co-healers weren’t always ready to immediately deal with it, usually using the ‘button that now exists solely for this type of mechanic’ lol, like Painhaima / Macrocosmos / Litany / Seraph

The point I’m making about newer healers is that in this hypothetical situation, Jimmy NoFriends has no way of knowing his damage output isn’t entirely necessary (until higher difficulty) . So if this player ends up with a bunch of additional damage options, aren’t they going to assume they need to hit them? I mean, it is a little counterintuitive to give a job buttons but tell them ‘you can not use those’. Wouldn’t a newer player just assume ‘if it’s there I need to use it for something’?

I mean, if he goes to the forums and reads about healers min/max’ing dps, healing primarily through oGCDs to assist dps output, etc, he’s probably going to know how to deal with increased healing requirements anyway through previous players experiences. Otherwise, if he gets overwhelmed by higher healing requirements because he just doesn’t understand it, surely he’s going to get overwhelmed by additional dps options too, because he doesn’t understand why they’re there

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Connor

The point I’m making about newer healers is that in this hypothetical situation, Jimmy NoFriends has no way of knowing his damage output isn’t entirely necessary (until higher difficulty) . So if this player ends up with a bunch of additional damage options, aren’t they going to assume they need to hit them? I mean, it is a little counterintuitive to give a job buttons but tell them ‘you can not use those’. Wouldn’t a newer player just assume ‘if it’s there I need to use it for something’?

I mean, if he goes to the forums and reads about healers min/max’ing dps, healing primarily through oGCDs to assist dps output, etc, he’s probably going to know how to deal with increased healing requirements anyway through previous players experiences. Otherwise, if he gets overwhelmed by higher healing requirements because he just doesn’t understand it, surely he’s going to get overwhelmed by additional dps options too, because he doesn’t understand why they’re there

---

Honestly, it depends on what kind of background Jimmy comes from. If this is his first trinity MMO, it's reasonable for a new player to assume that the healer role is meant to heal, they would also most likely assume that any buttons that do damage is meant for solo gameplay. I really doubt that a new player from that kind of background would look at an expansive kit and decide they need to engage with all of it immediately.

Now if Jimmy has a background of other MMOs, he would be more likely to engage with his full kit. Jimmy in this case would learn as he goes, eventually he may find himself looking for information and finding out how the job is meant to be played. This version of Jimmy would have no problems at all with an expansive kit.

EDIT: I am basing the first example off of my own experience. I never played any MMO like this before, never played WoW or similar. I started healing in HW. I looked at the full kit and came to the conclusion that Cleric Stance is for solo and I'm only meant to heal people when in a party. I'd wager that most players new to the genre like me would do roughly the same.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Connor

Did we? I saw that one person saying it was an issue, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else say it was something ‘too difficult’.

---

If you're referring to what I said earlier, it was in reference to Laerunes suggestion, especially around the "no MP regen" part. I'm all for increasing healing requirements, and thankfully I feel like the newest trial and Anabaseios normal modes hit hard enough for casual content.

Extra DPS buttons is just the safest way to increase the skill ceiling without impacting the skill floor much. Jimmy NoFriends can mess up and reapply his DoT or buff early, or overcap gauge, but so long as people live, no one will care about his DPS being supbar.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Connor

I mean, assuming Jimmy NoFriends is a new player and literally 1 HP more healing is going to make him freak the hell out and start randomly mashing his heal abilities off-cool-down until something happens. how do we justify giving that player even more dps options when they supposedly can’t deal with any kind of healing beyond the most simplistic and easily-resolved mechanics imaginable.

I mean, Jimmy NoFriends is (apparently) so dumb that it’s not fair to increase healing requirements at all or he’ll never clear content again. But we can overload his kit with a bunch of DoTs, DPS interactions, mechanics, optimisations, etc, and that’s totally fine. Not gonna overwhelm him at all, having all these damage-based mechanics and abilities on his job when he thinks he’s going to play a healer. You can make your ‘ but he can just be scum and not hit his damage buttons, it’s ok, we’ll just write about him in tales of D.F argument but we’ve already established he’s a new, incompetent player who can’t figure out things on his own .

---

Isn't this just the inverse of the strawman you're trying to call out? Nobody's saying '1 more point of HPS will cause Jimmy to freak out'. But we (or at least me, maybe others) are saying that if you want to increase HPS required as the solution, the amount you'd have to increase it by would either be low enough for Jimmy to still handle, OR high enough to satisfy the grumpy veterans. Some people struggle with Harrowing Hell in normal mode. Some can handle it just fine even in week 1 Savage. How do we make the healing required in content be low enough to not cause issues for #1, while also being high enough to challenge #2? There's no way it can be done, right? There's no overlap between these two points. So we either have to accept that the idea isn't going to work, or make specific concessions like 'this content is designed for casuals so it doesn't get heightened requirements', which leaves that content in the mire it's in right now (which means the solution sucks)

But also, the idea that we 'overload his kit with a bunch of DoTs, DPS interactions, mechanics, optimisations, etc' is pretty strawman too. We don't need an 'overload' of this stuff. Returning two DOTs to SCH is not 'overloading Jimmy with DOTs and DPS interactions'. Making the AST cards have unique effects again is not going to 'overload Jimmy with mechanics and optimizations', it's just what we had in HW and SB and we learned the system well enough back then. Additionally, we're looking at it with the lens of being like, level 80-90 and having everything dropped on us at once. Ideally, these 'new mechanics' would be added over the course of levelling, piece by piece, so that the player has time to get accustomed to each part in sequence. We don't get the entire BLM gauge thrown at us as soon as we hit a certain level, we get parts of it at certain level thresholds, and it compiles on itself to get to it's current complexity gradually.

I imagine that new players could handle more healing. They just won't be able to handle as much healing as is needed to make grumpy bastards like me, or people more competent than me (which are quite large in number) feel something in EX roulette again. And I've said it time and time again, a solution that doesn't affect every piece of content that suffers from the problem (eg healing being bland) isn't a solution. Writing off certain things like 'oh EX roulette isn't designed to be challenging so it can stay how it is' isn't going to cut it, because that's basically what Yoshi hit us with, with the 'play ultimate' quote. 'If you want healers to feel more fun to you, go do the harder content that makes up like 4% of the game, instead of partaking in the other 96%, that's not for people like you'

edit: we also have very few things that incentivize, organically, the healer player to actually use their damage buttons. If we had new damage interactions (learned gradually as you level, as above) that nudge the player to consider using damage as part of their gameplay to help them heal, instead of the current 'do damage or do heal, that's your choice with each GCD', it would help these newer players to consider doing damage as part of their gameplay, instead of jumping to 'healer only heals, damage is for solo content' (not sure that this happens, given that the Hall of the Novice tells you to throw rocks when it's safe to). For example, if we had a trait learned at some point while levelling that says 'casting Glare reduces the CD on Tetragrammaton by 1 second' or something

The point of a game is to be fun, and the sad reality is that for many healer players right now FFXIV simply isn't, or at least, the state of enjoying the healers is so conditional that it only applies to a eyedropper's worth of content that the game actually offers.

The sentence should just be "Healers are fun." None of this "Healers are fun when..." "Healers are fun if..." "Healers are fun except..." BS. Whether I am clearing the MSQ, farming Treasure Maps, progging Savage, soloing Deep Dungeons, I should be able to have fun as a healer. What kind of fun can vary from one piece of content to the next, but jobs need to be designed with all types of content in mind from multiple skill thresholds, from the novice to the master.

I was trying (and failing) to be facetious as opposed to literal. Which, in hindsight probably doesn’t make sense since I don’t post enough to make my overall view clear.

Without posting more paragraphs of my random musings, I’ll try and sum up the overall view.

Basically I think we can have both increased healing requirements and more dps options, and I don’t think one can/should be affected without considering the other. Like if we have more dps options, I think having more to heal comes as a necessary caveat to that.

I feel like healing requirements are being held back by this belief that if someone fails a healing requirement the Final Days is going to happen again. Even if someone is struggling with keeping up with higher healing requirements there’s also the co-healer, tanks, Red Mages/Summoner, Dancers (I guess we can throw Bards in there too lol).

And even if it does come to the worst and the party wipes, is that really so bad? I’d say it’s inevitable every now and then unless everyone’s a robot, so I think the idea that healing always needs to be so easy it can’t be failed by newer players doesn’t really work ultimately. I mean, it’s nobody ever can go higher when they’re just walking across a line instead of going up some stairs - if people don’t have reasons to improve, they’re probably going to stay the same as how they are.

I just worry that somehow the devs are going to read the feedback and mistakenly conclude ‘so it’s ok if healing stays the same as long as we give them more damage abilities’ (they’ve made weirder conclusions lol) which I don’t think is the answer. It’s only a combination of the two that’s ever actually going to make healers enjoyable.

and maybe some buff/debuff gcds as filler during downtime lol

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Connor

I just worry that somehow the devs are going to read the feedback and mistakenly conclude ‘so it’s ok if healing stays the same as long as we give them more damage abilities’ (they’ve made weirder conclusions lol) which I don’t think is the answer. It’s only a combination of the two that’s ever actually going to make healers enjoyable.

---

I've personally always been arguing for cutting down redundancies in the healer kit, making fights more heal-intensive and also giving healers a good downtime kit, many others have a similar opinion as well. If the devs truly looked into the healer forums and genuinely think that they only need to add a couple damage buttons to completely satisfy us, then I really don't know what to say.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Aravell

I've personally always been arguing for cutting down redundancies in the healer kit, making fights more heal-intensive and also giving healers a good downtime kit, many others have a similar opinion as well. If the devs truly looked into the healer forums and genuinely think that they only need to add a couple damage buttons to completely satisfy us, then I really don't know what to say.

---

I’d truly like to hope so too, but at the same time my mind just goes back to them deleting Energy Drain and expecting Scholars to dump their Aetherflow on idk Sacred Soil lol. They’ve made so many ‘far-out there’ decisions it’s a little hard to trust them not to continue the trend

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Connor

Basically I think we can have both increased healing requirements and more dps options, and I don’t think one can/should be affected without considering the other. Like if we have more dps options, I think having more to heal comes as a necessary caveat to that.

---

The way to do this would be (i think) to have more DPS actions to balance the split in our kit to be less skewed towards 'bloated with heals we don't need all of', and then build interlinking gameplay between the two halves. As it stands, on any given GCD, we mostly choose between 'do damage this GCD' or 'do healing this GCD'. However, a select few, positively received, actions, buck this trend. Lilies are healing, but later give damage via the refund of Misery. Pneuma and Macrocosmos are immediately refunded the damage, as they deal the same damage as a filler GCD when executed. So, with a more robust rotation for damage, the devs would have room to create ways for us dealing damage to, directly or indirectly, help us with healing. Be that with 'SGE heals better with Kardia' by making Kardia be something more, or 'damage builds a gauge that can then be spent on powerful healing tools when the moment calls for them'. A recent suggestion made over on healer forums was for SCH to have it's two fairies cover healing, and damage, and you the SCH cover the half the fairy does not. So you'd cycle between the two, having one phase where Eos handles healing and you DPS, and then a phase where you handle healing more (via AF heals), and Selene covers the damage. Rather than the halves of 'damage' and 'healing' be two distinct things, an idea like that blends the two, interlinks them, and makes them feel like one whole kit

As it stands, we look at our healing tools through the lens of 'how can I use this to create as much DPS time as possible'. What we could have is the reverse, of 'how can I use the DPS time I'm given to build up resources to access these powerful heals/mits', which then leads into asking the former question again, like a cycle. Medica spam should not be the 'moment of power' reward in a heal check, it should be the fallback option for when you have nothing left

The problem with healers and with most jobs is that SE feels compelled to add a new job every expansion but their resources to manage the jobs is not increasing. This means that having proper variety of healers is getting harder to maintain with their own identity. The raid design also makes it hard to have a variety of healers due to the number of slots, balancing so any combo of healers works and the “meta”.

Side comment, I always sigh when I hear them refer to WHM as a pure healer when all we do in raids is cast Glare/Dia while the other healer gets to heal. I don’t want to be a Glare Mage, I want to heal! Sadly, all I get to do is glare at the devs and Glare at the boss.

Wait, you mean we are all DPS? <hears some behind me> Yes… click

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Connor

Did we? I saw that one person saying it was an issue, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else say it was something ‘too difficult’. I’ve not had any party wipes to it that I can think of either, and while I do generally play healer myself anyway, but I never felt like the Co-healers weren’t always ready to immediately deal with it, usually using the ‘button that now exists solely for this type of mechanic’ lol, like Painhaima / Macrocosmos / Litany / Seraph

---

I went back and did a bit of digging/logs stalking, the occasions that came up first look like they may have been referring to Savage rather than normal. So it's possible that's an error on my part if so.

Eitherway, I'm not against healing requirements going up at all. IMO if SE can bring themselves to consistently and sensibly tune *everything* up in a manner that also forces healers to pay attention then the player base will adapt and improve to suit. It's definitely fair to say that a big part of the reason that swathes of the player base are as bad as they are is because the game openly allows and in some cases almost encourages it.

Quote:

---

I feel like healing requirements are being held back by this belief that if someone fails a healing requirement the Final Days is going to happen again.

---

This has always absolutely boggled my mind tbh.

Deaths in Everquest could literally lead into horror stories like losing whole sets of gear at low levels or being tied down into all night raid corpse recoveries at the end game.
In WoW you could get corpse camped and effectively locked down for hours leaving you unable to do anything outside of logging for the day and praying you could sneak away tomorrow.
In FFXI you could be forced into spending hours just to build up buffer EXP to prevent deleveling on an inopportune moment, and god forbid you actually develed mid raid.
In FFXIV you lose somewhere between 30 seconds and 10 minutes on a run or pull and some completely irrelevant amount of gil.

Despite the penalty for deaths being minuscule compared to what we've seen in older MMOs, people in FFXIV in general tend to take failure so much worse and it's not even just people attacking others over failures. People are far harsher on themselves than there's any need for. I've seen all too many people sit and dwell on problems mid raid when they should be learning from it if applicable and then getting over it.

Perhaps taking healing to levels where it's just a given that you're not going to one shot everything would be the reality check people need?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Connor

If these mythical ‘new players’ are so completely incompetent in their understanding of tooltips that literally struggle with the tiniest bit of healing requirements are as common as everyone in the forums like to say, doesn’t that make current design literal perfection ?
...I just don’t understand how we can reconcile that ‘new players can’t handle any more healing’ but ‘new players can handle plenty additional damage options’. Either they’re smart enough to adapt to new abilities or they’re too unskilled for those options to ever be increased in the future without ‘massively impacting’ their ‘enjoyment of the game’ or w/e. I don’t understand how the former can be true without the latter becoming false

---

This.
Entire.
Post.

The whole thing is correct. THANK you, good sir. Been barking up this tree a while myself.

Firstly, these players don't exist.

But, if we assume they DO, then more DPS buttons would make their heads explode faster than "Medica 2 more" would.

The answer is always "Well, they don't have to push them, healer DPS doesn't matter"...but from the same people that insist "Healers are green DPS and always have been because encounters are tuned around Healer DPS mattering to beat enrage". But if you bring that up, they say "Jonny Newhealer isn't doing Savages, so they don't have to worry about enrage". But then why can't we talk about raising healing requirements in Savage if JN isn't running them? "Because we need normal content to be less boring for the good players", but then we run into the same problem.

It's a big circular reasoning that doesn't make sense.

Either more requirements (healing or dps) will make people's heads explode or they won't. If they won't, then more healing is as good or better of an option. MSQ content doesn't need to be tuned to Savage difficulty, and high end players have never been challenged by normal dungeons and stuff since ARR's Hard modes.

It's a vacuous argument that doesn't really stand up well and requires the assumption that Newhealer will never do Savage anyway and that hardcore players will be completely content running 4 mans if they just have 2-3 more DPS buttons that will be sufficient to prevent their boredom...but that the changes also need to raise the skill ceiling significantly so they can show up anyone who isn't using them. It's all kinds of "This does not hold up".

"not properly engaging with (healing required)" will result in a wipe?

Tanks can SOLO encounters as it is now in casual content. I'm pretty sure a little more healing required isn't going to cause wipes left and right.

Same with your post further down, Connor. Correct on all points.

Healer DPS needs something. I don't think the job needs to be a DPS that occasionally heals people in terms of what buttons it has (I know that's what it is now once fight mechanics have been optimized), but just some kind of DPS mechanic.

I thought they made a great step in the right direction with the Blood Lily on WHM and the Sage getting Addersting when one of their shields gets broken, plus Kardia. Some kind of interaction between healing and DPS was something I thought had been missing from the game.

Now if they could just add some additional mechanic, it would be about perfect, if you ask me. For example, in World of Warcraft, the Restoration Shaman occasionally gets an instant cast Lava Burst whenever a target suffers damage from their DoT, and Lava Burst itself is guaranteed to crit whenever it strikes a target suffering from the DoT. Something like that would be fun to have.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Connor

I just don’t understand how we can reconcile that ‘new players can’t handle any more healing’ but ‘new players can handle plenty additional damage options’. Either they’re smart enough to adapt to new abilities or they’re too unskilled for those options to ever be increased in the future without ‘massively impacting’ their ‘enjoyment of the game’ or w/e. I don’t understand how the former can be true without the latter becoming false

---

While I don't agree that we'd be unable to add any further healing requirements (I'd guess we could get away with almost half more than we have now, so long as it doesn't require saved oGCDs atop GCD spam (i.e., is only added between the existing bursts and does not increase the size of our near-lethal hits... causing a brief period of upheaval while people adjust, but calming quickly)...


It has nothing to do with the cognitive load itself. It has to do with the cost of failure.

If you give healers 10-20% more damage they can do, even if you were to increase boss health by some portion of that, if the healer fails to take advantage of it... oh well. It is incredibly unlikely that that will be a significant factor in whether you hit Enrage, especially compared to just the damage optimizations already available to them.

If you give healers significantly higher healing requirements, let alone enough that our paucity of downtime actions makes sense, though, the cost of failure is... repeated wipes.


Now, I'm willing to risk/weather the adjustment period of repeated wipes for a better healing experience, but the two things are night and day.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Zakon

Healer DPS needs something. I don't think the job needs to be a DPS that occasionally heals people in terms of what buttons it has (I know that's what it is now once fight mechanics have been optimized), but just some kind of DPS mechanic.

I thought they made a great step in the right direction with the Blood Lily on WHM and the Sage getting Addersting when one of their shields gets broken, plus Kardia. Some kind of interaction between healing and DPS was something I thought had been missing from the game.

Now if they could just add some additional mechanic, it would be about perfect, if you ask me. For example, in World of Warcraft, the Restoration Shaman occasionally gets an instant cast Lava Burst whenever a target suffers damage from their DoT, and Lava Burst itself is guaranteed to crit whenever it strikes a target suffering from the DoT. Something like that would be fun to have.

---

Blood Lily and Addersting were definitely a step in the right direction. Now the only thing I feel is slightly iffy about them is that unless you're doing harder content (extremes or savage)... well, I barely have any chances to use my Blood Lily in normal dungeons. On dungeons release perhaps, but with overgearing comes the decreased need in healing, and at some point I end up with having three stacks of lilies that I don't need to use unless I decide to overheal in order to get blood lily charged. I funnily feel more pressed in level 50 dungeons where I don't have most strong heals when tanks pulls wall to wall while being undergeared, than I do in level 90 dungeons in the same ciscumstances.

Basically, it feels like there's a bit of a lost potential even with current healing design simply due to how gearing works here.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Renathras

Tanks can SOLO encounters as it is now in casual content. I'm pretty sure a little more healing required isn't going to cause wipes left and right.

---

Cool, now view this from the perspective of veteran raiding FC healer main, or even just a midcore/casual healer who happens to try hard a bit, has a passing interest in their logs and isn't a habitual overhealer.

What does a little more healing fix for this group of people?

Whilst you're busy laying yourself out at Connor's feet, you're completely forgetting the key point that I've been trying to ram home seemingly forever with regards to this.

Assuming SE don't suddenly roll back the years and revert us back to ARR healing kits, I don't think you realise just how high the healing requirements would have to be tuned to actually change a thing for a competent player that's paying attention. You might be able to catch Jimmy Newhealer with a bit of a spike for sure, but for someone who's ontop of their kit and keys? It's going to take a monumental increase. Literally making normal content deal savage levels of damage, perhaps even more tbh.

Why? Consider this, you say that normal dungeons and ARR hard modes were challenging. Sure they had non telegraphed mini busters and generally a ton more tank damage than we see now, but they arguably had no more raidwides than what we have today. So why were they challenging? Simple, we didn't have a huge overreaching kit full of powerful healing AoEs to delete damage taken. Nor did we have a huge variety of free healing and massive amounts of MP recovery on top in our own kits. Are you forgetting the days of WHM's being utterly reliant on Ballad and Bishop?

Now back to the question: We can't have huge mitigation checks because WHM is a thing that exists so the healing increase would need to be actual HPS pressure spread out over time, not just 1 huge aoe that insta kills if not mitigated correctly right? Fair so far?

Now, lets take Harrowing Hell's initial salvo before the pushback from Savage. If we go with a typical 40k hit after mitigation, then halve it for 4 man content that gives us an approximate AoE that deals ~25k every 2.5 seconds for 15 seconds for the sake of neatness.

So our WHM drops Lilybell, which takes care of ~15k leaving us with 10k

Asylum and Medica II ticks are ~8k, leaving us with 2k a tick.

One additional Rapture takes care of that.

So in that sequence we've spent 2 GCDs out of 6 total healing.

Ok cool, lets do it again so we don't have Lilybell on hand:

Our Asylum and Medica II ticks take care of ~8k leaving 17k a tick to deal with.

That 17k a tick comes to a total of 102k to heal. Lets assume our players have a worst case of 60k HP.

Assize falls in the window, that's 10k gone, our initial cast of Medica II is 6k dealt with. This damage is real, so lets throw a Cure III and Rapture in as well, That's ~25k. Throw PI over the Medica II+Cure III and there's another 10k.

Hey presto, we've survived the mechanic using 3 out of 6 GCDs.

'BUT SEB' I hear you cry, 'You've barely survived it by the skin of your teeth'. Sure, but I'm also not factoring in Crits, Temperance, Asylum's healing buff, party buffs or the good old fashioned trick of throwing extra mitigation such as Benison/Tetra on the squishiest party member (Conveniently yourself assuming all else is equal). I'm also using numbers based in my ilvl 630 gearset to deal with content that's a full tier above what I'm wearing.

The TLDR:

Strip away the savage mechanics around it and the damage isn't nearly as fierce if you're not having to focus on doing a dance at the same time. In meh gear I can deal with that using 3 out of 6 GCDs with the longest cooldown being 90 seconds for asylum. Drop that so I can do this every 60 seconds and maaaaybe we're talking 4 out of 6 GCDs.

To deal with Harrowing Hell Savage sans mechanics/pushback.

Think about that for a moment.

*Edit* I guess what I'm trying to say is that upping the healing requirements a little bit really isn't going to change much of anything.

The healing requirements need to go up dramatically AND our healing kits need to be pruned by fire or very little is going to be felt by anyone beyond the most devout Netflix enjoyer.

Don't get me wrong here, I'm all for it. The day a dungeon Porxie comes down and unleashes a P10S grade Harrowing Hell on my sorry hide is the day I get invested in healing this game again. I'd be all for it. But given SE's form over the last half a decade, I just can't see it happening. At this point I honestly can't see anything changing at all TBH.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Sebazy

snip

---

Isn’t that viewpoint from the devs the exact reason healers look the way they do now though?

Healer can’t have any higher or difficult healing requirements because they’ll wipe the party - so we have all healing mechanics reduced to simply ‘Press the correct button at the correct time’ (Lilybell / Macrocosmos / W/E). Anything else and the poor newbie healers simply cease to exist entirely and the party wipes unfailingly forever. So, gcd healing is extremely infrequent (so it doesn’t get in the way of ‘right button right time’) unless arguably you’re a White Mage, oGCD healing is extremely over abundant (can’t get confused about which button to press when they’re all the button to press lol), Mp management non-existent. Basically everything around ‘healing’ must, by definition be as easy as humanly possible, because it’s not possible for them ever challenge good healers, and new healers can’t handle…well, anything (apparently).

Then we come to the dps aspect, of course. SE agrees with the sentiment that new healers shouldn’t feel forced to use their damage abilities. Their solution? Remove all but one . Players can’t struggle with knowing how to maximise dps when it’s a single button. And since the healing requirements are going to be taxing them so much already, we wouldn’t want those dps abilities to get in the way of ‘right button right time’. And it even leaves skill expression cuz you can be like 1% better at dps than the other healers by using an ‘ancilliary damage option’ at the right time like Energy Drain, Lord of Crowns, Assize/Afflatus, Phlegma/Toxicon optimisation. Which, clearly are the height of gameplay, thank you for your wisdom SE (that literally nobody ever asked for lol).

But if they increase those dps options, then the new healers are obviously going to get all confused and start spamming DoTs with their eyes turned into swirls like a cartoon. I mean, if we consider the healing abilities the ‘correct’ actions in SE’s eyes, and the ‘dps’ actions as ‘bonus’, their logic relative to newer healers is unfortunately technically accurate. Limiting the amount of bonus actions they can do minimises the likelihood of them not performing the ‘correct’ action, and further steps of ‘bonus action’ are going to confound their understanding of when to use the ‘correct’ one. So, they make the ‘bonus’ as simplistic and reductive as possible (1 DoT 1 filler). Veteran players still have additional offensive actions to optimise to put themselves above the average, which was totally the exact thing they wanted (sarcasm lol, it’s really not).

Basically relative to the design concept, whose main goal is ‘SOS save the new healers’, if we give them extra healing options, somehow they’re going to wipe the party because they don’t know how to play or w/e. If we give them extra dps options, somehow they’re going to wipe the party because they don’t how to play or w/e. So they get an overabundance of ‘correct’ options - half of which they don’t even need - and only the absolute minimum ‘bonus actions’.

Honestly I do kinda think the whole is just a little insulting to ‘new’ healers - are they really just that bad? If we just gave them the benefit of the doubt and assumed that maybe they’re not going to be super bad from the word ‘go’, I think overall the devs would be much more amenable to expanding non-healing action availability. The sooner we stop making the assumption that a new healer is automatically going to fail for being pushed to heal more, the faster we can start to get more interesting and fun not-healing abilities. That’s what I think, anyway.

Also would like to point out the ‘we’ I’m referring to is the devs/designers not players themselves. Nobody would ever actually ask for… this lol.
Also for further clarity lol, when I say the ‘newer healers’, I think for SE this actually refers to two groups. Literal ‘new’ healers at level 1-89, but also ‘new endgame healers’ who have just hit 90

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Connor

Honestly I do kinda think the whole is just a little insulting to ‘new’ healers - are they really just that bad?

---

The ultimate irony of it all is that the content an actual new healer is chewing through is significantly rougher than the content that awaits them once they hit the start of the endgame.

You go from fairly rough leveling dungeons that require you to keep a tab on peoples health to your first alliance raid where you suddenly find yourself with nothing to do except die to mechanics as you learn the game's nuances and quirks.

It feels like SE just want the game as a whole to be as inclusive and accessible as possible even if it's to the detriment of long term players and try hards. It's just that they've taken this to such an extreme that IMO it's incentivising a standard of play where you barely even bother paying attention to the primary monitor.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Sebazy

The ultimate irony of it all is that the content an actual new healer is chewing through is significantly rougher than the content that awaits them once they hit the start of the endgame.

You go from fairly rough leveling dungeons that require you to keep a tab on peoples health to your first alliance raid where you suddenly find yourself with nothing to do except die to mechanics as you learn the game's nuances and quirks.

It feels like SE just want the game as a whole to be as inclusive and accessible as possible even if it's to the detriment of long term players and try hards. It's just that they've taken this to such an extreme that IMO it's incentivising a standard of play where you barely even bother paying attention to the primary monitor.

---

Yeah, it’s definitely bizarre that even just by way of having less oGCDs, newer healers are actually going to be more actively involved in healing than veteran players.

With any game, you kind of expect difficulty to be like stairs. You start at the bottom and move your way up, with things getting that little bit more difficult/complex as you progress.
Then you get to FFXIV and you start at the top of an escalator going downwards lol. You’re gradually moved away from the complexity and difficulty the further you progress, and you don’t even have any control over it. Then once you hit 90, are fully geared - at the bottom of the escalator, so to speak - you’re left with nowhere else to go.

They practically reversed the basic logic of difficulty scaling in video games with healer design lol; things get easier the further you progress, not harder

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Connor

Yeah, it’s definitely bizarre that even just by way of having less oGCDs, newer healers are actually going to be more actively involved in healing than veteran players.

---

Which is why I think cutting down the oGCD proliferation and power is one of the things we need to do.

The people most opposed to that, however, are the people who like healing plans and the people who like DPSing with healing being oGCDs they weave between damage GCDs.

I do agree that it's pretty backwards in terms of the leveling. Ala Mhigo is one of the roughest instances in the game.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Renathras

Which is why I think cutting down the oGCD proliferation and power is one of the things we need to do.

The people most opposed to that, however, are the people who like healing plans and the people who like DPSing with healing being oGCDs they weave between damage GCDs.

I do agree that it's pretty backwards in terms of the leveling. Ala Mhigo is one of the roughest instances in the game.

---

I just watched a WHM clear P12S and all they did was Glare/Dia spam with the only heals they used being cast just to get the blood lily for dps and assize. Other than that, they were full on DPS with no healing. oGCD heals are kinda broken right now on how powerful they are. I wish they would make a decision if they really want to keep GCD spells or just get rid of them and have all oGCD spam with individual CDs.

Healing is fine and the only complaints are coming from the vocal dissatisfied minority. If you don't enjoy the game as it is now then you need to leave.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by PetThisMiqo

Healing is fine and the only complaints are coming from the vocal dissatisfied minority. If you don't enjoy the game as it is now then you need to leave.

---

You did leave. I made it happen. You tried it against me. I'm too connected.

What's your next game?

Healing in FF14 works as follows : enough or not enough.
There is no bonus or need to heal more then the amount needed to survive. For this reason there is no need for GCD healing except certain special cases.
In short: FF14 Healers are desigend like there is random damage spikes and outburst, while the fight are desigend like a dance with no random damage.
One of the two need to change. So NO, giving more buttons, healing or dps, will not solve the problem or reduce it.

For me personal the change to more encounter randomness would be nice to make encounter less a memory game and more a way to show your skills but i can already hear the screams "REEEEEEEEEE, all healers will leave, REEEEEEEE, healers are hard, REEEE". This kind of argument is a non-existent one because first, MSQ will stay easy and aproachable with no problems or concerns. Secondly, only thing that will be reintrudced will the "skill ceiling" that got reduced and almost deleted for the sake of easy access without providing these advantages. Yes the healing at the moment is not better or easier, its just stale and repetitive. My arument is the skill floor did not change only the skill ceilling by almost obliterating it.

We need to accept that skill ceiling and skilll floor gameplay is diffrent and not a problem. I play extreme and savage and dipped my toe into ultimates and my wife plays only "the roulette healer". Its roulette and thats okay, no player is frustrated or angered about others beeing way better in an expert or alliance roulette. The devs need to accept also : THERE WILL ALWAYS BE A META. I swear, outthere on steam, is a "flower picking simulator" and i bet my kuponuts on it, there is A META for it!! Instead of fighting the meta, control and embrace it but stop believing you could stop it. Also stop believing you could change "mean people" there will alway be such "special ones", so please moderate and let it be done.

But SE will need to fail harder to make changes to the healers or the other points. They need to suffer and get the problems hammered home with a nuke... there are soo many problems and wishes of the playerbase the dev team and the management is not aware of even after LL's and Fanfest.... its almost comical.