Thread for future suggestions and constructive criticism for healer job design.

This is a thread for brainstorming about ways to fix various problems with healer jobs. These problems might be with how the healers work now, or how they will work in the future.

I want people to talk about things they like and dislike about the healer jobs (including currently and in Shadowbringers) and come up with ways to address the issues we have with them in a healthy way. Then we could give each other feedback about those ideas and discuss whether the rest of us would like or dislike it if they were to be implemented, thus we might get closer to achieving an agreement about what the jobs we like to play should be like.

Now, I don't want this thread to devolve into everyone saying "Bring back the WHM/SCH/AST from ARR/HW/SB", so I would like to lay some ground rules on how to share your ideas in this thread. Instead of giving ideas, you can also talk about problems that aren't already mentioned so that people can consider those while coming up with ideas.

1. Please keep in mind that I'm just a player and these are just suggestions and ideas. It is very unlikely that any suggestions in this thread will be implemented into the game.
2. I will make a list of healer job design principles that I think are important to FFXIV in this post, you can suggest things that you think should be added to this list and I will try to compile all such ideas.
3. I will also make a list of issues with healer job design in the present and in Shadowbringers, you can suggest other things that I might have missed or other issues you would like to be addressed about healer jobs and I will try to add all of those ideas to the list.
4. Based on these principles and issues, you can make suggestions and share ideas about how to either fix these issues, or how to better carry out these principles. I will not try to compile these ideas.
5. If you are making a suggestion, please mention which issues your suggestion is addressing.
6. You can also talk about or explain things that you found enjoyable about a particular healer job, I won't try compile these.
7. This thread will be focusing on PvE content only.

Healer Job Design Principles

1. Healer jobs should be fun to play.
   • This should be true for all content including raids, trials, dungeons, fates, quests(main/side/beast tribe), hunts etc.
   • Healer mains shouldn't feel like they have to level a dps or a tank just to enjoy certain types of leveling/ casual content aimed at Disciples of War and Magic.
2. Healers should never have to be more concerned about their damage dealing than about keeping the party alive.
3. The different healer jobs should all be balanced so that all 3 jobs are equally likely to be used in each type of content.

Issues with the Healer Role

1. Healer jobs are boring to use while doing weekly hunt marks/fates/quests etc. This is caused by:
   • The basic damage rotations of healers.
   • The low damage output of healers.
2. Newer players are intimidated by the responsibility of dealing damage while simultaneously keeping the party alive.
   • This might have to do with the players' control schemes or key bindings. Having to target/cycle between party members and enemies back to back might be a lot more difficult for some people than others.
   • The timings of burst phases in raids, and the durations of damage over time actions might make players feel like they have to be using offensive spells at very specific points in time.

Issues with Specific Healer Jobs

1. Astrologian's new card system(as seen in the media event footage) is very linear and uninteresting. There are less uses for the cards once drawn.
2. Many of Scholar's actions are used to heal the party in an inactive manner, such as Excogitation, Fey Union, the shielding "galvanize effect" and the fairy's automatic heals. This makes it seem like Scholar (in a party setting) is meant to create a time window where they don't have to heal actively so they can focus on dealing damage. This isn't a problem on it's own, however, the damage rotation has been simplified in Stormblood (and again in Shadowbringers) so now creating this "dps window" for oneself doesn't feel as rewarding.
3. Even though the White Mage job has very strong healing and damaging tools, players are worried the DPS players will prefer to party with the other healers since they have tools that can increase the damage output of DPS jobs.

Suggestion #1: Ease of targeting

Aimed to fix: People not wanting to dps and heal at the same time.

Healers could have a trait, similar to tank mastery, that lets them use any of their offensive actions while only targeting party members. For example: "Healer Mastery: Whenever you try to use a targeted offensive action on a party member, it will be used on the targeted party member's current target.". This would allow newer players to play healer relatively easily by eliminating the need to use "Cycle through enemies" and "Cycle through alliance list" keys at the same time and allowing people to go through entire fights by only using "Cycle through alliance list" keys. With this change more people might feel more comfortable with having more offensive actions since they can use all of them while the party is targeted.

Suggestion #2: Astrologian's cards.

Aimed to fix: The lack of depth in Astrologian's card system.

Astrologian could have an action similar to Royal Road, but instead of changing the effect of the next card, it could just consume the current card and give the Astrologian a 30 second buff on the next healing spell they are going to use based on the seal of the card. Let's say they all affect Benefic 1 and 2, Helios and Aspected Helios. Solar seal could give Diurnal Sect effect to it(or increase it for Aspected Helios), Lunar seal could give a shield that stacks with other shields and the Celestial seal could increase the potency of the heal and make it instant(or free). This way, there would be more decision making involved in Astrologian's gameplay without increasing the variance in their raid damage utility.

I will only address WHM since it's my main, and the continued lack of love the job gets is really bothering me.

WHMs problem isn't just the lack of raid damage utility. It also got huge, huge clipping issues that didn't get addressed, either. Also, most of its skills, including the new Afflatus-skills, are GCD skills, which further increases the clipping issue. To solve that, the Afflatus-skills need to get moved off the GCD and given a short CD, e.g. 15 seconds. They cannot be spammed back to back like Lustrate this way, but won't punish us for having to heal, either, and would also allow us to dump the Lilies within the time frame necessary to bloom the Blood Lily. This would majorly increase their usefulness in all contents and situations, like heavy movement phases, and also allow us to really use that damage potential we have to a point that might even make the need for a raid DPS buff vanish. I think the fact that we can only use Afflatus Misery every 90 seconds maximum would also balance it out.

One UI system I'd seen elsewhere I really liked was the ability to queue or even start casting a skill before having selected its target; for instance...

Let's say you hit a healing spell. You start casting but no target has been confirmed. If you have an ally already selected, you can just hit the skill again to confirm that ally as your target so that you can then go on to queue other skills (quite possibly onto/against yet other targets). If not, tabbing and reverse-tabbing would cycle through applicable targets only, while your mouse allows you to "snap" to or between applicable targets.

This could be further customized to move the mouse temporarily to your characters' facing or to your former target at the beginning of the "scan" (whereby your mouse snaps between applicable targets), so you could almost sort of conveniently soft-target or skill-shot in preparation for the cast and its target confirmation, and this whole system could be customized between instant casts vs. channels vs. hard casts and whether your current target was also your allied focus target (you could also have a second, enemy focus target).

Obviously, that serves no advantage towards healer balance or anything so on-the-nose, but I do think the increased ease of control could make certain designs feel more viable where they might otherwise end up threshed over the coming expansions.


More closely on topic:

In regards to Astrologian's Cards, I actually think we were already at a decent base previously, if we could just have a few changes, half of which would be beneficial regardless of the state of Astrologian or its Cards:

1. Attack Speed now also increases the damage of oGCDs and DoTs and reduces the duration of skill animations. MP (and TP, for now) ticks now scale with GCD speed. Skill Speed and Spell Speed combined into Haste, which now just increases Attack Speed. DoTs and HoTs now have a "roll-over" margin which can be absorbed into their replacing durations.
2. More on-Crit mechanics across all jobs, rather than fewer. Most jobs have one, though of varying significance. However, Secondary Stats have been rebalanced across the board, accounting for this utility value of Critical Hit. Guaranteed Critical Hits now have their damage increased by the excess % Critical Hit chance, but the Critical Hit stat no longer otherwise increases Critical Hit damage. The greater the significance Crit procs have on a job, the more base Crit their rotation gives them, which they are then balanced around such that Critical Hit raid buffs then have less relative impact on them (such that the damage advantage from external Crit buffs is more balanced across jobs).
3. Not all oGCDs have animation locks. These can instead be used even when in the middle of casting another spell or in the middle of another skill's animation.
4. Increased client-side trust in terms of queuing, allowing for decreased impact of ping on the immediacy of oGCD actions, which in turn better allows for oGCD-weaving across all players regardless of distance from their servers.
5. Even physical classes will use MP (now that TP is gone), though in a generally very self-sustainable way. One now respawns with 30% MP.
6. Lucid Dreaming gone, but jobs previously dependent on it will have their own ways to maintain their MP, while HP and MP regen ticks have been improved from 2% per 3 seconds to 4% per GCD and continue to improve, therefore, with Haste and Piety (while efficiency improves with Det and Crit).

And then some AST-only changes:

1. New Lumiferous Aether trait improves value of Ewer on self.
2. Spread no longer has a cooldown. Draw will now continue to recharge in the background even while holding onto another card for up to the 30 seconds. Royal Road now works more like Spread and is not active by default; with a Royal Road at the ready, one can Draw a new card and then either hit their Royal Road to apply the Royal Road effect or Use the card and then retroactively apply Royal Road to it to give it further duration equal to its original amount or increase its intensity by 50% or spread it to all other party members. Spread no longer activates the card, but simply returns it to the top of the Draw pile, from where it can immediately be used (via Draw/Use) or be consumed for Minor Arcana or Royal Road, with no effect on Draw's cooldown progression.
3. Redraw given 2 charges and reduced to a 30-second CD.
4. Spear buffed; still based around Crit, which is now the universal +procs stat. Arrow indirectly buffed by the above general change. Balance now also affects Healing Done and Bole now also affects Healing Received. Spire now reduces greatly MP costs for a short time, making it the strongest card for before AoE spams (heal or damage). Thus, all cards are reasonably balanced. (MP costs also further reduced slightly.)
5. Royal Road: Enhance now properly gives 200% potency.
6. Royal Road: Expand buffed against 3 or fewer affected targets. It now doubles potency before splitting the effect across all affected allies to a minimum of 50% effect, thus dealing 100% effect each to self and one other, 67% each to self and two others, and then 50% to 4+ total targets (including self).
7. No more card effect limits. If you want to bank for a cooldown phase you could theoretically Extend-Balance a DPS and then Spread back a Bole to RR-Enhance a newly drawn Arrow so that the DPS would have +20% Attack Speed and +10% Damage/Healing at the same time.
8. Celestial Opposition and Time Dilation now take into account the % power/duration of its Card effects affected. A 200% power and a 50% potency Extend card will both only receive half the extension from CO, while a 100% potency card would receive the full duration increase.
9. Celestial Opposition and Time Dilation now refresh any shield effects to a maximum of 50% and 100% of their originally applied value, respectively.

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Originally Posted by Anoin

Healer Job Design Principles
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What is fun to you may not be fun to me. Fun is subjective. They will never be able to create a healer job that is fun to everyone, especially when so many people have decided healing jobs should be designed around damage dealing and not healing.

True balance can never be achieved without making each class's abilities identical short of flavor tooltips and animations. Players are always going to strive to determine what is best to create a meta comp as if that's going to improve their chances more than learning to how to excel at playing their chosen job will.

Did this community learn nothing from the DRK who was part of the world first Ultimate kill at a time when DRK was being spit on by the meta community? A good to excellent player in the worst job is still going to outperform the bad to fair player in the best job.

Ignore the meta community "knowledge" and go with the player who can actually play their job with the skill needed for progression.

Of course healers aren't going to be as interesting in content that has little to no need for healers. If you want to be dealing damage that badly, then you shouldn't be using a healer job. Most hunt parties in the mega trains would prefer people using tank jobs for the enmity generation as it is.

It's not just new players that get intimidated by responsibility. Veteran players are likewise intimidated by it. That's not something that SE can fix - that's a personal issue.

A healer should never have to be more concerned about their damage dealing than about keeping the party alive. If the group is failing DPS checks, it's not the fault of the healers unless they are letting players die that could have been healed. It's the fault of the damage dealers. Stop blaming the healers for something that isn't their fault and maybe new players will be less intimidated by the responsibility that healers have and more intimidated by the responsibility they have as damage dealers to play at a competent level.

Stop obsessing over healer DPS. Damage is not the healer's job. The more you emphasize damage, the harder you're making it for SE to create the healer balance you claim you want because everyone is focused on the wrong metric.

While there is reason to be concerned about some of the design changes based on our current end game experience, we don't know how those changes will interact with level 80 end game design. I'd rather see informed changes being made over how things work out in practice than over theory about what things might be like based on content design that we know nothing about.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

What is fun to you may not be fun to me. Fun is subjective. They will never be able to create a healer job that is fun to everyone, especially when so many people have decided healing jobs should be designed around damage dealing and not healing.

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Understandable, in that case please try to explain what you think is fun about healing, so that we can come to a mutual understanding. In my opinion, I do not like being an item or a tool that only exists to let others do the damage in a raid. I like having to assess risks and manage them, I feel satisfied when I deal damage not because I'm helping the party, but because I feel rewarded for making use of my time and resources to find a window where I can dps. I do not think healers should be designed around dealing damage of course, but having more tools to heal is unnecessary and no matter how low a healer's dps might be, so far in the game healer dps has been the main factor on dungeon clear times, which isn't going to change with the skills we saw from the media tour. Plus, so far, healers have been using 10% of their time to heal, and rest to dps. In order to increase that amount to, for example 60%, the damage output of the bosses would have to be increased by 500%, which would place more emphasis on healer gear rather than healer skill.

Anyway, I'm getting off topic. The principles were there to emphasize that, in my opinion, the player base shouldn't focus on one principle too hard to the point they ignore the others. The developer team cares about fun and balance in every job in the game obviously, whether you like it or not. It's just how they went about it doesn't end up carrying the principles in my opinion.

I don't care about "True Balance". That whole part you wrote about balance is irrelevant to this thread. People that want to dps as healers don't want it for the sake of being more desirable in raids, they want it for self fulfillment, and enjoyment of their job.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

It's not just new players that get intimidated by responsibility. Veteran players are likewise intimidated by it. That's not something that SE can fix - that's a personal issue.

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This is an absurd claim. First of all, the "Veteran players are likewise intimidated by it." is simply false.
Secondly, "That's not something that SE can fix". Not only are the changes we see being made to healers proof that they identify this as a problem and are trying to fix it, you probably have this opinion if you have a shallow approach to game design. You don't have to change the healer actions around to try to fix this, you could work on UI or the healing system in general to alleviate this problem. Just as many or even more people get intimidated by having to heal in the first place. You can't keep simplifying jobs until no player has to put in the effort to get better at the job.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

A healer should never have to be more concerned about their damage dealing than about keeping the party alive.

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Fair enough, this is the kind of thing I want to see more of in this thread. This is your opinion and tells me a lot about what you think is enjoyable about healing and what isn't, I will add this to the list of principles in a bit.
That being said, Dps tools can be implemented to healers in a way that doesn't sacrifice healing, doesn't make players shy away from dps to a point where they feel like they are healing is bad or where they feel punished for healing instead of dealing dps. If healing and dealing damage at the same time is intimidating, dealing damage can be simplified and made easier so that people can get the satisfaction of deciding when they should do what.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

The more you emphasize damage, the harder you're making it for SE to create the healer balance you claim you want because everyone is focused on the wrong metric.

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Stop focusing away from dps to a point where healers get more and more redundant healing tools every expansion. You are making it harder for SE to create jobs that require skill or feel rewarding. Every healer has 10 million healing tools, so they are either going to use just enough healing, and do damage rest of the time anyway, or the content will require healers to use every single healing tool they have, In which case, an optimal cooldown rotation will be laid out by the community, and the thing that will end up separating healers that can clear content from those that can't will be gear.

Suggestion
Importance of healer damage and timing.
Aimed to Fix: Healers feeling like they have to be deal damage at certain portions of the fight.

Healer damage can be changed to be unaffected by raid damage buffs and cooldowns like trick attack or battle litany. With this I would also suggest things like Chain Stratagem and Astrologian's Cards to be reworked to benefit the healer rather than the raid. This might be a naive suggestion regarding AST since it would change their job identity a lot. But there might be benefit in brainstorming about other ways to address this issue.

Make the healers true to their historical counterparts from past FF's
-Healer jobs should have unique identity that sets them a part from each other

-SCH was never a summoner, it was essentially a redmage that was a pure caster with utility but not as strong in healing or damage as WHM or BLM .. which it originally was in 2.X and has strayed very very far from it ever since 4.0

-AST is a buffer, it bolsters allies with divination, it does still have this, I just feel that uniqueness has lost its edge and fun nature to it at a first glance, some people compare it to time mage but the new name gives this one a lot of wiggle room.

-WHM is the forefront of White Magic, it's whole toolkit should be about Healing, Buffing (Brave, Faith, Protect, Shell), and when the job is done well access to powerful white magicks that it's resources could be used upon instead as a reward for a job well done

I always was excited to see spells from past FF's be brought into this, to see them grow into the Jobs I grew up with, complete versions... instead they've done the opposite, hopefully their identity is gradually restored one day.

You know, it's actually not possible to give effective criticism before ShB launches. You're missing a critical part, you can only speculate on how encounters will be based on your experiences. The whole doomsaying thing really needs to wait until several weeks after launch, so results are normalized and not just whiny, knee-jerk reactions, unless something is so obviously broken that it's unplayable or completely invalidates mechanics.

All of your suggestions are based on theory, but nothing is going to change before it can be put into practice.

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Originally Posted by lordcruxis

You know, it's actually not possible to give effective criticism before ShB launches. You're missing a critical part, you can only speculate on how encounters will be based on your experiences. The whole doomsaying thing really needs to wait until several weeks after launch, so results are normalized and not just whiny, knee-jerk reactions, unless something is so obviously broken that it's unplayable or completely invalidates mechanics.

All of your suggestions are based on theory, but nothing is going to change before it can be put into practice.

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True that we don't know about how content will be like in 5.X. And my intent with this thread is not to doomsay(I may have reacted a little strongly to Jojoya's post, I apologize for that), but to give constructive criticism to the developers. I wholeheartedly hope that the new content in 5.0 and beyond will be fun to play as all jobs, and I do believe the devs can deliver really fun experiences.

I believe it is definitely possible to criticize the changes based on the content we already have experience with, since we will still be doing that content after 5.0 releases anyway. We will do old dungeons, alliance raids etc. to level. And they rarely ever change old content to work better with new changes. How healers interact with this content will be different after 5.0, based on what we know. And these changes don't have such a significant effect on other roles.

From what we have experienced since before Stormblood's release, we know that they are most likely done with job changes at this point and are focusing on creating content until release. And even if they identify issues with certain jobs after 5.0's release, it will be difficult for them to focus on these issues after the patch development cycle has begun, and any strong rework will have to wait until 6.0. So while I believe it would be ideal if they could address these issues before the release of 5.0. I don't actually think the problems we have will be fixed until later, if ever. I don't mean to demand things from developers, I just want to bring some attention to aspects of this role that I enjoy(as well as many other healer mains)

Aimed to fix: According to the media tour, Scholar can't use Aetherflow outside of battle. This means that as soon as the battle begins, the Scholar has to waste a 10% MP regenerating ability while wasting the MP gain.

Suggestion:
Give Scholar another job gauge that acts as an extended MP gauge that stores the equivalent of 2000-3000 MP.

When Aetherflow (or another instant MP restoration ability) is used while MP is full, the overflowing MP could be transferred to this gauge. Healing spells with MP costs automatically use this gauge if available.

Scholar should also have 2 more offensive oGCD actions that can interact with gauge.

1. First one is a single target instant damaging oGCD that transfers around 600-800 MP from the gauge into your mp bar. If target is effected by a Biolysis cast by you, your MP increases for the amount but the gauge doesn't deplete.
   
2. The second offensive skill works similar to Bane did, it spreads the Biolysis on the target to nearby targets, the spread version of Biolysis does much lower damage per tick. Upon casting this ability, you restore around 300 MP for each additional target the DoT spreads to. And if your MP is full, this additional MP is transferred to your gauge again.

The lore explanation for this gauge could be that your fairy holds up to some aether for you and then gives it to you when you need it.

I would actually really like to know what people think about this one.