Healers need an overhaul

Here's a blast from the past. It may not have been terribly interactive. The skills may not have affected one another too much. The design under a microscope may be lacking a LOT of the buffing, skill chaining, and FUN that healer classes in a lot of games have. But my God, look at the comparative variety of flippin' abilities you used back in Heavensward. The uninterrupted chain of eight back to back casts of Stone is an ANOMALY. Compared to how garbage healers are designed these days? I'd take even flawed design like that in a heartbeat.

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Originally Posted by D6Damager

And I'm OK with that.

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And this is why we can't have nice things.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

I just don't understand it. It's so far beyond what I am capable of comprehending as a human, like an alien language. I've heard arguments about wanting to keep some jobs as "brain dead" so they don't have to think about anything when doing their roulettes, but like... If they gave any of the healers a more engaging DPS rotation, and Susan over here is upset because she just wants to one-button-spam and not think about anything, then just do it.

News Alert: Any job can be brain dread if you just do your basic rotation and nothing else. So no, I don't' think we should have jobs where the skill ceiling is still brain dead because every job is brain dead if you want it to be. If you're someone interested in brain dead, you clearly don't care about being optimal anyway, so who gives a rats ass? How does no one understand this?

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It's the fact that everyone knows they're willing ignorant of the class that makes them not want to have the ability to press more than one button.
They already have enough problems with the imaginary big bad boogie men they make up and then project said boogie man onto anyone who even says/types their name, imagine if people could press more than 1 button and they were still only pressing 1 button.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

Here's a blast from the past. It may not have been terribly interactive. The skills may not have affected one another too much. The design under a microscope may be lacking a LOT of the buffing, skill chaining, and FUN that healer classes in a lot of games have. But my God, look at the comparative variety of flippin' abilities you used back in Heavensward. The uninterrupted chain of eight back to back casts of Stone is an ANOMALY. Compared to how garbage healers are designed these days? I'd take even flawed design like that in a heartbeat.

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Wow imagine being able to press more than 2 buttons. I miss the skills just not the days.

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Originally Posted by MintnHoney

There's only so much support you can provide to people in any situation. If party members keep dying, and the answer is "you better keep their HP at max OR ELSE" then fine; but if party members keep dying, for FFXIV, the answer really is "get good," per Yoshi P once upon a time, because there aren't many encounters where players should be dying over and over unless they're actively doing something wrong (such as standing in the wrong place at the wrong time).

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Yea, that's my original point. The thing that makes parties fail tends to be errors in dealing with mechanics, not simply "the healer isn't good enough", because it would be too binary if everything hinged on whether or not the healer can keep up.

I wish healers had job gauges that tied to dps. I don't need a UI element to tell me if that one SGE skill is active. It already shows the combo lines or how they are called. Scholar's job gauges are really boring. Use skill for points -> use heals -> maybe use big fairy...

Tanks have dps combos and mechanics tied to them. Why not healers?

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Originally Posted by BRVV

I wish healers had job gauges that tied to dps. I don't need a UI element to tell me if that one SGE skill is active. It already shows the combo lines or how they are called. Scholar's job gauges are really boring. Use skill for points -> use heals -> maybe use big fairy...

Tanks have dps combos and mechanics tied to them. Why not healers?

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To be fair, most of those tank gauges aren't much more interesting for it. DRK's gauge doesn't need to be on one's screen. WAR's gauge is just a Fel Cleave charge counter. PLD's gauge is just a Shelltron charge counter. GNB's is a GF-if-available-else-Burst/Fated counter. Let's face it; Shadowbringers and especially Endwalker has done all gauges dirty.

But yes, having more to do with our gauges could be a boon. (Not necessarily, as tying things behind something else has as much chance to be a change for the worse, but it certainly could help out.) That'd apply even if we ultimately went a whole different direction with some of them.

To take SCH, for instance, I'd love to actually bring back Eos/Selene distinctions and go deep into that. I don't care if that means bringing back Attack Speed as a Selene buff and certain people getting pissed at having received it just because "Oh, no, what will I do with this extra GCD?!" (Though, I'd prefer that raid fights strayed back away from easily having 100% continuous uptime even for melee or BLMs and that we had more than a single raid buff timing, so I'm clearly just a sadist.) Give us more active control, more to do, more to capitalize upon. And then see what the gauge might have in store for/from that.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

To take SCH, for instance, I'd love to actually bring back Eos/Selene distinctions and go deep into that. I don't care if that means bringing back Attack Speed as a Selene buff and certain people getting pissed at having received it just because "Oh, no, what will I do with this extra GCD?!" (Though, I'd prefer that raid fights strayed back away from easily having 100% continuous uptime even for melee or BLMs and that we had more than a single raid buff timing, so I'm clearly just a sadist.) Give us more active control, more to do, more to capitalize upon. And then see what the gauge might have in store for/from that.

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I'd love to see a distinction between Eos and Selene come back as well, doubly so if they made it to where we could swap between the two in battle to actually use them tactially... because SCH is supposed to be a tactician of sorts, right Square? It's a shame that there's so many good ideas present in the healers, and instead of figuring out a way to make them work, the developers would rather just remove them from the game.

Taking healers and stripping down the healing kit and expanding upon the DPS kit seems to be a perfect solution to what they claim they want to do with healers.

Bare minimum, i.e. the skill floor, is keeping the tank/party alive during pulls. Simplifying the healing kit a little bit into a smaller number of abilities instead of having 10 abilities that basically do the same thing accomplishes that. The people who just want to heal can sit there and heal.

Skill ceiling right now is the "perfect" use of OGCD healing abilities while slamming 1 button over and over and then another button every 30 seconds. Why not make the DPS kit a lot more complex.

That way the people who want to play well can play well and use the entire kit. The people who want to play "ok" can just do what they're doing now, use the regular attack and keep DoTs up. Then the people who are allergic to dealing damage as a healer can have a nice easy braindead job to play.

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Originally Posted by LeonKeyh

Taking healers and stripping down the healing kit and expanding upon the DPS kit seems to be a perfect solution to what they claim they want to do with healers.

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We even have proof it would be a successful endeavour, as we can see from the new PvP overhaul. While it isn't perfect it still manages to make most jobs, especially healers- distinct in identity. WHM is unga bunga, SCH focuses on DoTs and utility, AST has old cards and Double Cast and SGE is a DPS focused glass cannon.

I do concede that PvP is entirely different from main content and warrants a different design philosophy, but it still stands that healers can easily have all of this without sacrificing anything from current PvE gameplay.

I am largely in agreement with the idea some have posted that they should make healing and dpsing more tied together for healers, and in doing so, make healers have more moment-to-moment involvement in the game.

Probably the easiest example would be to make freecure tied to Glare instead of cure 1. But a more elaborate idea for white mage specifically(since I'm most familiar with white mage) would be:
Every time you deal damage, you accumulate a secondary gauge. This gauge empowers a second nuke skill they add(let's call it 'Blood Glare'. If the second nuke skill is used with more than 80% of the gauge full, it makes your next healing lily OGCD.

But I think this game does need something to help:
1) Make new healers realize dpsing is a part of their job.
2) Make the decision process on healers a bit more involved in terms of dps.
3) Add a bit more excitement to moment to moment gameplay for healers when things aren't going horribly wrong.

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Originally Posted by Tychonius

Yea, that's my original point. The thing that makes parties fail tends to be errors in dealing with mechanics, not simply "the healer isn't good enough", because it would be too binary if everything hinged on whether or not the healer can keep up.

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I apologize for missing that point, then. If nothing else, we at least seem to agree.

You know, I think it's funny that they had ever claimed that they don't take Healer DPS into account when setting limits for encounters, not because we've determined that that's not actually the case (although we have), but because it kind of means that they never really counted us, in the end, as part of the equation that moves towards the game's goal. Even in that statement, we are kind of an unneeded presence in fights, other than, maybe, to be baby-sitters and additional obstacles for the players who actually matter. :/