Nerfing Healer Role Through Content

Something I haven't seen discussed a whole lot is how to nerf the healer class as a role. We talk a lot about how to fix each individual healer, but let's just take a second to admit that healers are exceptionally powerful in the current content. Healing is a breeze even in some of the Savage raids and still leaves us room to DPS. Hell, SCH is basically a 5th DPS.

So let's switch gears and talk about nerfing from the angle of the content itself. Yes, bigger numbers hitting the tank would put a slightly larger strain on our Cure button but we can take things a step further.

In dungeons we can add a couple more trash mobs per pull, but what about easily identifiable mobs that have mini-tank busters (like those bees but less extreme and without the self-sacrifice part), or roaming monsters that spawn at a random location in the dungeon to keep the party on their toes? This would add a small variety to our roulettes without amping the difficulty too much but just enough to find those DPS windows harder to find and predict or create.

NM/HM trials could do with needing more work out of the off-healer, especially during add phases. Maybe more hazard spots or DoTs getting thrown out to other party members (the exploding healer mechanic from Ifrit EX comes to mind).

EX/Savage raids need the main healer to REQUIRE focusing on the MT, and this content could do with some more communication between tanks and healers. Tank busters that would OHKO a PLD even with a defensive CD (outside Hollowed Ground), but, say, a WAR could sponge. In this situation, let's say the tank buster would dish out 1k over the PLD health. The healers could top off the PLD and provide a shield the keep him alive and then focus heal him back up or have the WAR Provoke the attack and the PLD takes back aggros while the off healer heals up the WAR and main healer never stops focus healing the tank.

I want to know what you guys think. You can pick apart my examples, I admit I don't know a whole lot outside of WHM and a couple others I'm only now getting into so there are probably holes in thise examples somewhere, but the point is to think of ways to make the content itself nerf the healing role instead of strictly thinking of what traits/actions to remove/add/alter.

The last healcheck that sticks out in my mind is Judgement Nissi, mostly because the other healchecks are raid-wide damage, so I'd like to see more of that going on. But if we're suggesting mechanics, I'd like to see more of the old zombie enemies from older Final Fantasy games, enemies that need to be healed to be killed, while the healers also focus on keeping the party topped off.

You picked a very odd title for your post.

In any case, I would be for increasing the healing requirements in content. Assuming SB follows the same pattern as HW, we'll get that in leveling content. Then endgame when ilvls start climbing and climbing, well...

Trash mobs having more powerful (unavoidable) cleave moves they use from time to time could help a bit...

Just to make sure I'm not giving you insufficient credit, what's your endgame experience as healer? Have you cleared Savage battles? EX trials? If so, when did you? Did you clear them while they were still relevant and the attainable IL to enter them was close to the minimum? Or did you clear them some time after they were released, by getting better gear and etc.

Don't take this the wrong way, I just want to make sure where you're coming from to understand your points better.

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Originally Posted by Fernosaur

If so, when did you? Did you clear them while they were still relevant and the attainable IL to enter them was close to the minimum?

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I know this was directed at the OP but this still brings up some points I want to mention:

Half the problem is, indeed, being overgeared. Because the content is outdated when it's released. Sure, 11s and 12s have a fair bit of healing to do. But, say, Zurvan ex... that was a joke to soloheal from day 1, unless you get tanks that don't like using CDs on the Wills or something and even then.

And even excluding such content, dungeons at minimum ilvl do take a decent bit of healing. This is why large pulls lead to wipes on the HW leveling dungeons at 55/57+, and why the same thing will probably happen in SB in June. But outside of that... once we're at "endgame" dungeons, they're always going to release 30 or 40 ilvls below what players are at, and yes, that's a big part of why they're so trivial.

That doesn't mean it's not a problem, though.

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

And even excluding such content, dungeons at minimum ilvl do take a decent bit of healing. This is why large pulls lead to wipes on the HW leveling dungeons at 55/57+, and why the same thing will probably happen in SB in June. But outside of that... once we're at "endgame" dungeons, they're always going to release 30 or 40 ilvls below what players are at, and yes, that's a big part of why they're so trivial.

That doesn't mean it's not a problem, though.

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the question is why are they 30 or 40 ilvl below your actual ilvl at release?

1 - they are designed for that ilvl so a new player who has just started the game can jump into the dungeon without getting gear from any weekly lockouts first.

2 - they are designed for that ilvl so a second class of a veteran player can directly jump into the dungeon without getting gear from any weekly lockouts first.

so... why is the "Expert" dungeon designed for new players, who have a lot of "new" dungeons they can choose from from previous patches (at least they are new for them), and second classes? why not for main classes?

you can not only design it for a higher item level, but also make it harder overall, since new players and second classes, both indicators that the player is not as skilled as a veteran player on his mainclass, are excluded from the dungeon.

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Originally Posted by Fernosaur

Just to make sure I'm not giving you insufficient credit, what's your endgame experience as healer? Have you cleared Savage battles? EX trials? If so, when did you? Did you clear them while they were still relevant and the attainable IL to enter them was close to the minimum? Or did you clear them some time after they were released, by getting better gear and etc.

Don't take this the wrong way, I just want to make sure where you're coming from to understand your points better.

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I kinda only just got into raiding recently, so maybe I don't have room to talk in the first place. My experience is clearing A9S a couple weeks ago at i269 and most of my knowledge of other raids comes from my bf talking it through with me while he heals it. The pattern I noticed is that even when the damage gets intense, a lot of it is avoidable so I was thinking along the lines of something unavoidable but, with some coordination before the fight, is easily healed through.

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Originally Posted by Littlegreen

Something I haven't seen discussed a whole lot is how to nerf the healer class as a role. We talk a lot about how to fix each individual healer, but let's just take a second to admit that healers are exceptionally powerful in the current content. Healing is a breeze even in some of the Savage raids and still leaves us room to DPS. Hell, SCH is basically

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I dont really get the impression that healers want harder heal checks its plenty of healers that still struggle with healing a tank on large pulls , I dont really think we need it to change

I see a few people suggesting unavoidable damage to increase the amount of healing a healer has to do. My own point of view on this idea is that unavoidable damage is the exact opposite of where the game needs to go. It dumbs down skilled players from, you know, playing skillfully. That's why Titan EX is awesome. You need to dodge. You play skillfully or you die. If you make damage unavoidable just so the healer can heal, everything is dumbed down for everyone.

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Originally Posted by bswpayton

I dont really get the impression that healers want harder heal checks its plenty of healers that still struggle with healing a tank on large pulls [...]

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There are seriously healers that have trouble pressing CureII/BeneficII/Adlo on the same target over and over?
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I suppose some people even miss the cookie in cookie clicker >_>

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Originally Posted by Tint

you can not only design it for a higher item level, but also make it harder overall, since new players and second classes, both indicators that the player is not as skilled as a veteran player on his mainclass, are excluded from the dungeon.

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You can definitely make the content harder to heal but accessible to new players, especially once they've gotten to SB. At that point they should be pretty familiar with their class. It doesn't even need to be just throwing in bigger numbers, you can put mini-mechanics in the dungeon itself or give the trash mobs some tricks up their sleeves. The last time I had trouble in a dungeon was Baelsar's Wall after coming off of a 2 week break and was a bit behind gear-wise and even then it was just the very first couple pulls I was having trouble with (but I did appreciate the enemy bards throwing venom/windbite on party members. It wiped each of my parties when pulling both encounters but it's def the kind of stuff I want to see more of). After that it was laughably easy.


For example, there's no reason that in Sohm Al Hard I should go in as SCH and almost never leave Cleric Stance, even at i267. Selene should not be able to keep the party alive by herself, in boss fights especially. At that point it's too little damage.

Man I do not like this topic but often i see complaints that healing is too easy. Personally, at least to me early level healing up to 60 wasnt necessarily what I would call fun and easy, and hence I never touched it after getting whm/sch to 60. I could make some terrible, but realistic suggestions to do this but I kind of respect the healing community because unfortunately as of HW I just cant seem to bring myself to want to or even bother. I will say this, though it might just be a matter of opinion. Cleric Stance could just get trashed/canned/done away with, and have all their damage spells base off of mind. I know some people enjoy the thrill of stance dancing, but that skill really stopped having a logical purpose in 2.- release, since well its not like it was cross classible with thaumaturge anymore.IF they did this though, the draw back potentially could see a change like tanks, potentially lowering overall healing or damage by a noticable amount I dont know how much anyone would like to see that personally
Often we focus about tanks and their responsibility, but in my opinion were sort of downplaying just how important healers are. Tanks are useless if theres no healer, Its an inevitable wipe if the healers are down and no smn. I would rather see more options than what we currently have (smn) to balance it out a little. And then after that, we could dip into whther healers heal too much

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Originally Posted by Littlegreen

I kinda only just got into raiding recently, so maybe I don't have room to talk in the first place. My experience is clearing A9S a couple weeks ago at i269 and most of my knowledge of other raids comes from my bf talking it through with me while he heals it. The pattern I noticed is that even when the damage gets intense, a lot of it is avoidable so I was thinking along the lines of something unavoidable but, with some coordination before the fight, is easily healed through.

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Ah, I see. I figured this might be the case.

As Tasashi said in an earlier post, a lot of the problem that makes healing "easy" at this point in the expansion is the massive power creep that has come with higher IL. It is something that was particularly jarring in 3.X because the IL power creep has been ridiculously fast. Compare tank HP at the end of ARR with tank HP at the end of HW. A WAR could have around 14k HP by the time Final Coil of Bahamut ended. Now, a WAR can reach up to 50k HP. That's three times as much HP in a single expansion.


A really good example of this is the way Thordan EX has become by this point. It used to be the hardest HW primal by a massive margin, but now you can ignore a lot of mechanics and still faceroll through him thanks to the IL increments.

In any case, my point is that the problem is less about the content design in terms of concept, and more in terms of how it interacts with our gear levels. Zurvan is a perfect example of something that was released with outdated damage:gear parameters. However, if you had tried to do raiding content or EX primals at around the minimum IL required to enter, your opinion on healing design in the game would be very very different :).

Thankfully, I think the devs are aware of this power creep problem, and I hope to see it more or less fixed by the time Stormblood comes.



Another thing that I have to talk about is that the whole "main/off" mentality that applies to healers and tanks is awfully flawed logic. There's no real reason one healer should have to shoulder more of the healing burden other than what their toolkits allow, and the same goes for tanks. You don't see SCH dpsing 80% of the time because the other healer is basically solo-healing the fight. And if this is the case, then the SCH is not efficient or good. A good SCH will make proper use of Eos and their insta-cast toolkit to keep AoE healing covered, as well as emergency healing from people taking avoidable damage and buffed regens+fairy on the main tank. This allows not only for the SCH to DPS, but also for the other healer to have a massive amount of good DPS windows. Of course, the lower the IL, the less both healers can DPS, but the concept should be the same. A SCH doing their job properly will be doing around 30% more healing than the other healer due to the fairy alone.

In the end, it's pointless if SCH's own DPS is 1800 if the other healer's is just 200 or less. It's much better for the raid if both healers are at around 1300, to give an example. All of this ain't because the content is "easy to solo-heal" and SCH is just sitting there DPSing, but because the job's specialty is creating DPS windows by using the fairy to heal and mitigate. Of course, you won't see this in trial roulettes and Party Finder pts, because it actually requires communication and trust between the two healers, and that ain't something you're expecting from PuGs.

The same thing can be applied to tanks, but I think my post is already long enough, lmao.

I'm of the mind set that anything you can offer as a solution can be countered by utility we already have in game. And the reason we won't see an increase in healer responsibility is because not all healers are created equal.

Not to mention requiring more usage of a healers utility in things like dungeons raises the skill cap in a place not designed for it. And requiring more usage in things like EX and Savage will make the healing requirements they already have become a burden for some.

I think you grossly underestimate how different the healers are. And while I'd love to see the skill cap raised through more cooldown management, I don't think it's something SE is willing to do right now.

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Originally Posted by Littlegreen

Healing is a breeze even in some of the Savage raids and still leaves us room to DPS. Hell, SCH is basically a 5th DPS.

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As stated above, it'd be very useful to know your raid experience to give us a good idea of the angle you are coming from. Going by Lodestone and such, I'd guess you recently got into the raiding scene and didn't do the prior Alex tiers or Coil? Apologies if this sounds elitist or such, I really don't mean it that way.

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Originally Posted by Littlegreen

In dungeons .....

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More mobs isn't really the answer, and if anything will be rather counter productive to your goal as it just overinflated healer DPS (Eg, I was doing 1000+dps on SCH in neverreap/fractal in ilvl 180 gear). Making dungeons more complex or flat out more difficult doesn't really work so well for the bread and butter daily roulette either, rough dungeons will always have a fanbase but the vocal majority will object and rage quit =/

All told, SE appear to have the right idea with gates, they just need to be a little more inventive with them. My vote would be having mobs that merge and progressively hit significantly harder mixed in with pulls. The end result would be a pull akin to the first Brayflox HM pull but with the damage ramping up significantly faster. Healy healers get to throw the tank in the deep end and actually have something worth healing, whereas a group with weaker aoe might be better off sticking to smaller pulls giving the healer significantly more room to DPS.

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Originally Posted by Littlegreen

NM/HM trials ..... (the exploding healer mechanic from Ifrit EX comes to mind).

EX/Savage raids need the .....

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Gonna lump my thoughts on primals and savage roughly together to keep this somewhat shorter than war and peace.

I will add tho, it's good that you mention Ifrit EX as that's probably the biggest 'healer fight' primal in the game and it was defo a favourite of mine <3

Starting with the trial specific stuff, I think hard mode primals are in the right place, the only thing I would change here is to rename it to story mode as yeah, 'hard mode' isn't really fitting anymore now that we only have 2 difficulties for these fights.

For EX mode primals, I feel the issue here is that for the most part, healers get it rather lightly with mechanics. However I wouldn't say they are drastically off point, whilst the difficulty has varied somewhat, most of the EX trials are a good stiff challenge in the appropriate gear. Zurvan is probably the most obvious glaring point here and it's a bit of a shame SE didn't alter him to make the first soar unskippable.

The deal with Zurvan kind of stems from SE's current approach to handling boss mechanics at the moment though and I suspect it'll be something they look to address come 4.0. I don't know how much Savage Alex time you have, but pretty much this entire tier of raids has key mechanics and often entire phases that can simply be skipped by strong DPS. Whilst yes, this was a thing as far back as Titan EX where you could skip the need to do a tank swap pre final phase, but it's never been anything like as significant as this to the point where it trivialises really very significant chunks of the encounter.

Somehow removing these skips would go a long way to addressing the seeming ease of Savage currently, particularly A12S which frankly is easier than A11S by someway if you have the DPS to skip the second fountains (Which really isn't hard at all with 15% echo).

Now for the juicy bits, how to make these encounters harder to heal! Three methods spring to mind for me, the first is simply to throw more mechanics specifically at the healers, note that simply jumbling the healers into more mechanics that would otherwise only target the DPS isn't such a good idea as it adds a significant luck element to your overall raid DPS and that isn't going to be popular with the progression teams. As above, Ifrit EX is a fantastic example of this sort of thing in action, A7S shows that it can be fiddled with and expanded upon, I don't doubt there's more options there!

A second option is kind of an expansion of A1S during early progression, forcing the group to spread and stand apart whilst significant amounts of damage is another option SE should explore to force more healing time. We all now how frustrating it can be to heal the various 24mans through aoe damage and it surprises me that SE haven't played on that further.

The third and one I've mentioned in other posts is simply to have the boss or bosses smash both tanks into the floor at the same time :o T1 and T11 were both great examples of this whilst they were current progression content and it's a theme I'd love to see SE take further. If you've never done it before, T11 is about the best encounter in the game that doesn't have a primal or a dragon in my eyes, well worth a go if you haven't done it already.

You might note that I don't really talk about bigger tank busters, frankly I don't think it'll help much, at best you're going to get the the SCH out of cleric for one GCD to adlo the tank and as is, that's not going to make a blind bit of difference. In my eyes the only way this will work would be to either 1) bring back T5 style debuff chains to draw the healers attention away from freely DPSing or 2) have bosses that auto attack more rapidly for significantly more overall damage combined with smaller but much more frequent and slightly erratic mini tank buster hits. A fed dreadnaught in T4 with ilvl appropriate gear is a good example of what I mean here. Not to mention, a rapid and hard hitting boss opens up visual possibilities to keep things fresh and interesting.

All in all tho, I think SE earn a 'must try harder' on their school report for Heavensward, I'm inclined to say that they got more of the encounters very right than they did wrong with A3S, A5S, A7S and A10S really standing out as fantastically enjoyable turns that were tuned appropriately. A8S was pretty much the perfect end of tier boss showing that you didn't need absurd DPS checks to make something super challenging.

On the /fail side though, they really need to prioritise giving healers more viable options beyond shrugging their shoulders and firing up cleric stance (I made a lengthy rebalance suggestion for AST that was aimed at this exact issue about a year ago). They also need to settle on a single vision of how they foresee the meta heading and actually work on educating the player base to function at a higher overall standard than the dross we have to deal with today, it's not really fair to hammer down on underperforming players when the game does such a horrible to job of informing them as such. Maat would never let this stand in FFXI ;)

One last thing that's not really healer specific but I'll throw out there anyway. Probably the best way to slow down the massively evident powercreep between tiers without diluting the gains from big upgrades would simply be for SE to lessen the increase of vit per ilvl.

Not sure if the OP has the complete picture unless they haven't cleared all of Creator Savage.

Scholars heal quite a bit too in Savage, the thought of us just a 5th DPS is a bit of a fallacy. You can't judge that based on the easier floors like A9S/A10S. In-fact the best raid groups this tier actually end up having the Scholar do more HPS than the other healer because of Eos and Indom being so good, yet both healers are still putting up good damage.

While Creator Savage is an easier healing tier than the previous two, the bulk of the work for a regen healer this tier was more on AoE healing like A11S photons, Double Whirlwinds. A12S with Double Holies, Sacrement, and Holy Bleed. Tank busters this tier had more chances to mitigate with being shared with another tank or tower (A11S) and immunities (A11S/A12S). Of course there was also the distinct advantage Dark Knight brought this tier over a Paladin because of magic mitigation. So amount of tank healing depended on your composition, and healer/tank skill (do they mitigate while in DPS stance or play safe in tank stance more than they should, etc)

Zurvan Ex is kind of a poorly tuned fight from the get-go, as noted by all the Skip Soar memes. Especially after the talk that YoshiP said they were considering it's difficulty because of how many groups cleared A12S before January. I felt they probably could have made the meteor debuffs do more damage-over-time cause we sure had a lot of time to DPS as long as you kept regens up during meteor mechanics.

I don't think Square is looking for something to increase the gap between the average and the best healers even more. If the persisting enochian change is any indication that they would like to close the skill gap. As much as I wouldn't mind the idea of proper CD management - which, by the way, is already part of it -, having a strict repertoire would make it less forgiving and the skill gap would remain or even increase. Increasing damage isn't something they should do either. Too much and it'll be impossible to clear content till they get more gear. But stay as it is and bloated ilvl would just keep the problem. Even if a little was added it would increase the skill gap as mistakes would become more unforgiving. If we look back at some older raid content, Square-Enix did some things right concerning healing "strain":
Second coil of Bahamut turn 2 (aka Turn 7)
Second coil of Bahamut turn 3 (aka Turn 8)
Final coil of Bahamut turn 3 (aka Turn 12)

If anyone remembers, in Second Coil of Bahamut turn 2 someone had to kite the Renaud that appears from time to time and there was a certain degree of management and planning involved with it. I believe most of the time summoners and bards would do this. I have done it a few times as a Scholar myself while maintaining my part of the healing duty. And this was hella fun to do. It opened some options for the individual player ability within the group. If the healer(s) can handle it, let the healer(s) handle it. If not, let some other player do it.
The same for Second coil of Bahamut turn 3. You had sets of towers and till the last couple you would only need four players to handle that mechanic. Healers didn't had to be included in it. But if they can handle it, why not? It opened up options for the group on how they would tackle certain mechanics without mechanics being forced on certain roles: Role specific jails from Midas floor 3, for example.
For Final Coil of Bahamut turn 3 the story is the same: Red fire/blue fire and fountain in particular.

While the skill gap is still there, the average ability is now from the group as whole. Rather than from a single individual. If healers are doing mechanics, they'd have less time to spend time doing damage. In exchange the rest of the group can focus on doing damage to balance it out. If a summoner would deal with the mechanics, healers would have more freedom to help contribute with damage. Personally I'd love to see more mechanics that could be done by any role. Of course, meta will drive groups to handle mechanics a certain way. And the problem remains that some healers would like to be catered to and take the free ticket out of mechanic- as well as damage duties. But to be frank, healers that can't handle healing and mechanics will just have to wait till the playerbase heavily outgears the content.

I'd have a lot more love for T7 if I hadn't have accidentally caneslapped a Renaud to death during my trial with Exordium. Shot my nerves to bits for a week that did lol =(

But definitely agreed on T8, it's kind of a shame it was such a forgettable boss, as the mechanics going on around it with the towers were fantastic.

Very good examples for sure <3

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Originally Posted by Littlegreen

EX/Savage raids need the main healer to REQUIRE focusing on the MT, and this content could do with some more communication between tanks and healers. Tank busters that would OHKO a PLD even with a defensive CD (outside Hollowed Ground), but, say, a WAR could sponge. In this situation, let's say the tank buster would dish out 1k over the PLD health. The healers could top off the PLD and provide a shield the keep him alive and then focus heal him back up or have the WAR Provoke the attack and the PLD takes back aggros while the off healer heals up the WAR and main healer never stops focus healing the tank.

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I'd be wary of adding things like this to increase the healer burden. For starters, as others have mentioned this is very reliant on where everyone's stats are. A shot that will OHKO some Paladins will be unsurvivable even shield for others, and surviveable with no shield for better geared tanks (Also, that doesn't mean a WAR can survive due to higher HP: PLD gets more damage reduction, so while the WAR has more HP they also get hit harder.) Secondly, not every class shields equally. I know playing as WHM any mechanic where shields are highly desired makes me weep, since Stoneskin takes AGES and can't be done alongside topping off their HP.

One little issue with the game is how content needs to be clearable with literally any party composition, you can't have skills only certain jobs within a role have, or at least you can't get away with it now. I know the early days of ARR had a few fights where Silence was required, which only one tank, a couple DPS, and one healer have access to, but the only one where it was straight up required was Coil, and at the time you needed to go in with a pre-made party at the entrance, no duty finder. I imagine if they implement any fights down the road that straight up require skills only certain jobs have, that it would need to be a similar case where people can specifically invite people to do those roles and change job beforehand if needed.

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Originally Posted by Urthdigger

I know the early days of ARR had a few fights where Silence was required, which only one tank, a couple DPS, and one healer have access to, but the only one where it was straight up required was Coil, and at the time you needed to go in with a pre-made party at the entrance, no duty finder. I imagine if they implement any fights down the road that straight up require skills only certain jobs have, that it would need to be a similar case where people can specifically invite people to do those roles and change job beforehand if needed.

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there were silence potions wich you could throw at the enemy. but since nobody botheres to prepare properly (EVERYONE should have these potions on their hotbar when joining a fight wich requires silence) you are right anyway i guess...

Silence isn't THAT difficult to have, though.You have PLD, you have NIN, you have BRD and MCH, and you have the trainwreck that is SCH's silence, lmao. There was a particularly deadly Silence mechanic in A6S. Of course, the deadly part was nerfed once A6S made it into Duty Finder, precisely because of the reasons cited above: you could get a party without Silence, and then you're fucked. As Tint said, though, you could have used Silence potions for that, but that's having too much faith in the DF playerbase.

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Originally Posted by Littlegreen

For example, there's no reason that in Sohm Al Hard I should go in as SCH and almost never leave Cleric Stance, even at i267. Selene should not be able to keep the party alive by herself, in boss fights especially. At that point it's too little damage.

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you have to consider the minimum ilvl required for this dungeon, I'm not sure you can realistically say "even at i267" you are 37 points over the required ilvl for the dungeon and (i think) 22 ilvls over the level of the drops. then again, we weren't really having problems at i230 depending on player skill either, did have to heal slightly more though.

also you have interesting ideas for savage raids and such but i think that they would require fair reworks of the tanking classes as the average mitigation considering cooldowns are relatively equal amongst the tanks themselves and it might require a mana regen or mana pool rework for the healers if they have to heal that much. a good idea might be something similar to sophia where the TB applies a debuff that (in theory, less in practice, especially now) should require the tanks to at least swap or become hard or impossible to heal.

Infrit EX, and A7S are still among my favorites because of healer "swap" mechanics. Getting put into situations where you have to be the only healer while the other has to go-away or they will wipe the party has always been fun. A7S was a more refined version since we had kitty, jails, and balls. So healing-on-the-move was a big emphasis. This was a real good Astro fight where you got to use every skill in your toolkit to it's potential.

Levi Ex was trying to do something similar but with SCH fairy focusing the other tank, and Stoneskin, you were able to get around the healer stun. You had to be really bad White Mage, or the party being that bad to ever hit the maximum stacks.

To a lesser extent, A12S tries to have a healer "swap". Where one healer (usually Astro or Scholar) is solo healing outside with crystal damage, a tank buster, and mitigating the shared heat damage. But with BiS ilvl and a good raid this is completely cheesed with the healer time-gate add being LB'd down by a DPS. The other healer can just stay out as well, or go into a DPS time gate to nuke an add. Maybe if Alex Prime put some sort of "go away" debuff on certain players where they forced them to go into time gates this would have worked better.

You can't count dungeons as much of a challenge, considering the high-end of max ilvl is already over-geared for them. However only a partial chunk of the general population plays up to their ilvl potential. So there is that factor. Although I like more of those large and damaging pulls like the last ones in Library HM. Those things still hurt at i270 tank BiS without decent cool down use (usually use an immunity and hope ranged will LB that junk).

Come to think about it, Library HM was the last decent dungeon we got in HW. The current dungeon line-up is rather poor.

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Originally Posted by Fernosaur

Silence isn't THAT difficult to have, though.You have PLD, you have NIN, you have BRD and MCH, and you have the trainwreck that is SCH's silence, lmao. There was a particularly deadly Silence mechanic in A6S. Of course, the deadly part was nerfed once A6S made it into Duty Finder, precisely because of the reasons cited above: you could get a party without Silence, and then you're fucked. As Tint said, though, you could have used Silence potions for that, but that's having too much faith in the DF playerbase.

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Hey now, I had a few clutch Selene Silence saves for Mind Blast back in Midas. Now A8S version, we needed Eos during bot-craze, if the BRD/MCH/NIN missed then I wanted to beat their head with a stick.

Honestly if the healing requirement was sorta stiff but you could still DPS that's fine with me. I would rather be able to contribute more and get it done faster than be stick afk spamming the most MP efficient heal I have.

Regardless as long as stuns work it's still just gonna be holyholyholyholy for me anyways.

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Originally Posted by DaulBan

Honestly if the healing requirement was sorta stiff but you could still DPS that's fine with me. I would rather be able to contribute more and get it done faster than be stick afk spamming the most MP efficient heal I have.

Regardless as long as stuns work it's still just gonna be holyholyholyholy for me anyways.

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so holyholyholyholy is good and curecurecurecure is being afk?

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Originally Posted by bswpayton

I dont really get the impression that healers want harder heal checks its plenty of healers that still struggle with healing a tank on large pulls , I dont really think we need it to change

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Isn't part of the issue is that you need large pulls to get even a challenge in some way?
I wish this game had something like mythic+ from wow legion which make dungeons an actual fun challenge again as a healer.

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Originally Posted by Tint

so holyholyholyholy is good and curecurecurecure is being afk?

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Because holyholyholy gets your through faster, is actually roughly the number of holys you're going to go for depending on MP on a pull, and still requires you to pay attention to your tank's health as the stun fades. Or in a fight like A9S the stun doesn't even work so you're still dumping a ton of MP for damage while still monitoring the tank's health for the entire duration regardless. It's so expensive that you have to actually plan during a dungeon what you're going to do because going sub-1000 MP is quite easy to do but you still can't let the tank or anyone else die.

And honestly the best way to tank or heal (in my opinion) is the one that gets the most damage so of course I'm going to spam DPS moves as much as I can, but those are always more risky and require more attention than the easy alternatives (tank stance, shoving cures down the throat of a tank at 90% HP).

Honestly, I don't think much needs to change.

Healing has always been about keeping other people alive. So naturally, when you play with high-skill players, even at end-game content like a12s, healing is a breeze... because everyone is competent and knows what they're doing. If it becomes harder for healers to keep the party alive, then that raises the bar on the rest of the party to play flawlessly. So it really just equates to making dungeons harder in general. The more experienced you become at something, the more boring it tends to get in general. It feels less intense and exciting when you've broken everything down into a perfect set of choreography, from where to move when, to exactly when to cast what healing spell when.

If you want to experience more intense healing, play with less experienced players. One thing I enjoy doing is running my WT extreme trials on DF. Yeah, it's kind of like being in a learning party. But it's a lot harder to keep people alive when they're getting hit all the time and/or building vulnerability stacks. And, honestly, there's not much to do at endgame in FF14 either. In other MMOs I've played, I can always just farm gold to buy various things, from fashion to gear for alts. And because it's all really expensive, it keeps me grinding stuff out for longer. But since gear is ridiculously easy to obtain in FF14 compared to other games, and gold has virtually no use outside of fashion (which most people only really want one outfit of anyways), there is nothing to do except... have fun. And focusing on having fun is the way it was meant to be anyways! So go hop in that DF TitanEX queue that rewards you with no worthwhile items! Because in the end, it's the fun that counts.

Another alternative option for properly intensive healing, get 8 like minded people who want to be challenged by something different and queue for 8 man stuff at min ilvl.

Even good old Titan HM is utterly vicious done like this.

Yeah, we recently cleared Titan Extreme minimum ilevel because of no content to do lately. Of course, stomps gives us healers the stomach ulcers and jumps must be mitigated just like A8S J-Kicks, if you want a comparison of the heavy damage. It also kind of bites because the min ilvl is lower than the gear we naturally had when it was released (i90).

Word of advice as well when doing this stuff, try to scrap-up decent gear stats for doing such minimum level encounters. Since you are sync'd you can have a real "BiS" to make it more palable.

I've always seen it from the other side. It isn't that healers or tanks are so powerful that is the problem.

It's that 99.9% of the games mobs are designed to be "trash". They pose no threat at all... That's why tanks can tank 20 of them at a time.. because there designed to be "trash".

You can complete a lot of the games content without a healer at all. Can do a lot of it without a tank. Some of it you could probably do with just dps...

I think that highlights that it isn't that healers or tanks are too powerful that is true. Because even when removed entirely the content is still doable...

The problem is that virtually everything is deliberately designed to be weak and labelled as "trash" and simply doesn't pose a threat.

Even at 230 you can do sohmm hard with a tank and 3 dps. It's not powerful healers because you've basically removed them entirely and still able to clear it..

Pretty sure the main-healer/off-healer meta around which the OP's logic revolves is really bad for the community, bad for DPS, and bad for team synergy. It should go away.

Why people hate healers SO MUCH? I mean in every game they are the ones to blame for EVERYTHING, if dps is not enoug, lets blame the healer for not helpingour POOR dps, If i dont evade AOE, lets blame healers cause its their work to keep me healed, if they are too strong, lets ask for a nerf (holy) if they are too weak lets ask them for more dps.

Lets just ask SE to erase healers from existence, please, so DPS and tanks can do any savage content by themselves, PLEASE.

It's the double whammy of healer mistakes generally being the most obvious, and when the worst does happen it's usually other people that get killed. Instant recipe for rage =(

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

Another alternative option for properly intensive healing, get 8 like minded people who want to be challenged by something different and queue for 8 man stuff at min ilvl.

Even good old Titan HM is utterly vicious done like this.

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I wanted a real challenge yesterday, so I put up a PF for TitanEX with 4 players (1 tank, 1 healer, 2 dps), and SYNCED, with no Echo. Technically the options don't allow that, but we worked around it by having 4 people join as volunteer dropouts haha. It took us about 45 minutes, but we cleared it like that. And it was the most fun I've had in ages. The hardest part was probably on the tank to time Hallowed Ground and lose the Vuln Up stacks. I want to try ShivaEX like that next, assuming it's actually possible to 4-man it (I'm guessing it is, but the DPS checks might be a problem...)

Nice! The EX primals were fantastic bosses and it's good to see people going back and using them in different ways <3

As far as Shiva goes, as long as you have enough HP to survive the stack and shared cleave with 4 you should be ok, I remember carrying training runs through this fight for 10+ minutes at a time and I'm struggling to remember an enrage. It always seemed to be a back to back run of staff phases that would grind us down.

If you want further recommendations after that, I throw BCOB Turn 4 into the hat! Not sure what it syncs down to, but if it's around 100ish it should be a really good challenge for 4 due to how buffed the dreadnoughts will get ;)

[General]

Healing is not breeze easy. If you cleared content with good time level and Echo (Which buffs healing and dps) you won't find it that hard.
But try doing it at lower item level or even at the same item level but without Echo. You will notice a big difference when your healing and dps goes down by 15%.

Also, there is no such a thing as main-healer and off-healer in raids. Both have to balance their healing together.
There is shielding type and regen type. One is good at preventing damage and one is better at restoring HP.
The better protection one offers the less the other has to heal in general. Which is why they should work together.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

Some of it you could probably do with just dps...

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Some of it, you could. Most you couldn't - it depends on the amount of damage that is un-avoidable. Ravana EX is a typical target for no healer runs, simply because he spends a lot of time channeling avoidable mechanics.

On the flipside, just lately, A11S and A12S have been done with only tanks. I doubt we'll see the same with 8 DPS anytime soon (not before Unsynced for sure). I'd not be surprised if 8 healers could do it, though. Similarly, PotD solo rankings are lead by healers and tanks, the exception being summoner, who is tank, healer and DPS all in one package with Sustain and Titan Egi. And in PvP, teams without healers are at a pretty big disadvantage (up to a point because no cleric stance). Less so with tanks, because their mitigation isn't relevant when nobody attacks them.

It goes to show that tanks and healers are, in fact, too powerful. Just about everything a group of full DPS can do, a group of full tanks or healers can do better, easier and more conveniently. They can do far more than DPS as well, both solo and in a group.

And that's not mutually exclusive with some content being do-able without them. That only exacerbates the issue and trying to fix it via content only means one thing: Perpetuating it.

You can do that. You can make it so tanks mitigate 99,999% of all incoming damage and then make mobs hit so hard that you need that mitigation in order to survive while everyone else gets one-shot. But that then means that you can never fix the underlying imbalance such mitigation causes with the other roles, because you now "need" that broken mitigation, so you can't remove it anymore without tuning the damage down as well, at which point... why didn't you tune down the mitigation in the first place?

The same applies to healers, naturally. And to DPS as well.