I thought Yoshi wants healer to focus on healing only..

Or is Eden Savage an exception?

If your group sees enraged and your dps was non-existent, it is 100% your fault. Not a lot of room to slack off when barely meeting the min. Item requirement.

What Yoshi thinks and what his Encounter and Class design teams are actually putting out are two different things entirely.

My focus on healing was literally until I got used to the job again. Then it's been back to DPSing constantly. YoshiP may want it, but it'll take more than healer changes for it to happen.

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Originally Posted by wizzed

Or is Eden Savage an exception?

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despite what everyone keeps saying, his statement was in CONTEXT of SCHs shielding, and not contributing to healing.
So it was a comparison to "lesser healing+ shielding" vs "healing focused" types of healers.
he felt the devs should focus on designing healers mostly on being able to heal.

Western players mistook that to mean, heal vs DPS.

(Not to be confused with how they balance content to ignore healer DPS, when at the item level they want you to be, which is also not the same as minimum item level)

Healer DPS will always be expected unless SE disables their DPS buttons in group content. Get used to it.

Yoshi wanted all healers to have pure capabilities so each one is able to pull their weight not that they should "only" be healing. He knows DPSing is always going to be a thing otherwise WHM wouldn't have ridiculous damage potential, and unless encounters are greatly changed then there will always be downtime.

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Originally Posted by MaraD_

NA players mistook that to mean, heal over DPS.

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This is not entirely true. While the devs have never said healers shouldn't DPS at all. Yoshida has gone on record several times now saying they want it to be optional outside of early Savage clear attempts. Unfortunately, the game simply isn't designed to accommodate such a philosophy. Outgoing damage outside Savage is far too low for a healer to sit and spam heals. Unless this changes, the community will always expect healers to contribute DPS no matter what the devs say.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

This is not entirely true. While the devs have never said healers shouldn't DPS at all. Yoshida has gone on record several times now saying they want it to be optional outside of early Savage clear attempts. Unfortunately, the game simply isn't designed to accommodate such a philosophy. Outgoing damage outside Savage is far too low for a healer to sit and spam heals. Unless this changes, the community will always expect healers to contribute DPS no matter what the devs say.

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only if the players are entering with minimum iLv,and not performing at perfect 100%.

the DPS requirements are based on iLv, perfect play -10%. only between DPS and tanks.
but if you enter at min iLv, then healers will need to do DPS to make up the difference.

again, i was talking about the original comment, not yoshis stance on healer DPS in general.

They've been inconsistent at best in their comments. In one interview Yoshi will say "Of course I want healers to still DPS when they don't need to heal." and in others he'll say "We feel healers trying to optimize DPS is bad." Perhaps they don't realize that the only real benefit of optimizing healing is increasing healing downtime... which means optimizing DPS. The two go hand in hand.

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Originally Posted by Urthdigger

They've been inconsistent at best in their comments. In one interview Yoshi will say "Of course I want healers to still DPS when they don't need to heal." and in others he'll say "We feel healers trying to optimize DPS is bad." Perhaps they don't realize that the only real benefit of optimizing healing is increasing healing downtime... which means optimizing DPS. The two go hand in hand.

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I dont see anything inconsistent with those statments? "Optimizing dps" and "not standing around twiddling your thumbs" are two different things that dont contradict each other. Casting damage-spells when there is clearly no need to heal because everyone is well above 50% HP is different from optimizing your dps by letting the tanks HP drop to 2k to heal them with benediction so you've got more time to cast stone.

No one has ever said that.

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Originally Posted by Urthdigger

They've been inconsistent at best in their comments. In one interview Yoshi will say "Of course I want healers to still DPS when they don't need to heal." and in others he'll say "We feel healers trying to optimize DPS is bad." Perhaps they don't realize that the only real benefit of optimizing healing is increasing healing downtime... which means optimizing DPS. The two go hand in hand.

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I feel like...
If you can DPS, you should.
You always prioritize healing first and when there's downtime, you DPS.
Might as well or you're just chilling for no reason then everyone cries
when they wipe because they couldn't meet the DPS check because your heals
were overhealing or doing nothing. They dunno what to do with this I guess lol.

The challenge I think devs are facing here is that they want healer damage as an option, but not a requirement. The problem is that players make it a requirement to compensate for how bad their DPS is.

I don’t really get why they don’t just flat out say what they actually want healers to ‘do’ or ‘don’t do’. It’s undeniable that DPS is a huge part of the healer role by design, so why they don’t just come and say ‘healers should be dealing damage’.

And then of course, you have the fact that despite the devs act like dealing damage is a choice on the part of the healer (which it really isn’t unless you want to afk). Then, to make things even more confusing, they give us a ton of extremely powerful oGCD heals that let us DPS even harder, but then lower of the amount of damage dealing options.

Basically they’re saying they want healers to heal, then design the entirety of the game the exact opposite way, then start making changes that go completely against the design they’ve created. I’m honestly not sure why they’re doing this, it’s like they’re trying to cover up what healers actually are, like they’re somehow embarrassed by how DPS heavy they are. Even though they’re the ones that made it like that in the first place.

As far as I’m aware I’ve never heard developers mention that healers in FFXIV are largely offense-oriented, or that they’re capable of dealing respectable damage, or that they don’t fit with the traditional ‘final Fantasy healer healer’ role. They just act like none of these extremely important damage aspects of the healers don’t exist and that this isn’t an issue anyone has come across

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Originally Posted by Kazrah

The challenge I think devs are facing here is that they want healer damage as an option, but not a requirement. The problem is that players make it a requirement to compensate for how bad their DPS is.

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If I could like this more than once I would.

As a healer, I'd rather be doing things more focused on healing and supporting the group instead of doing damage when possible. Right now once healing is taken care of, the next best thing I can contribute to a group is doing damage for that very specific reason. Even if there were more varied ways I could support the group, I'd still probably feel that doing damage would be the next best option unless the other support options were pretty significant.

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Originally Posted by Hawklaser

If I could like this more than once I would.

As a healer, I'd rather be doing things more focused on healing and supporting the group instead of doing damage when possible. Right now once healing is taken care of, the next best thing I can contribute to a group is doing damage for that very specific reason. Even if there were more varied ways I could support the group, I'd still probably feel that doing damage would be the next best option unless the other support options were pretty significant.

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A fix would be having more intensive healing for us to do, honestly.
I don't mind DPSing but I prefer to heal lol.

DPS culture.

And yet all our role quests are dps focused, with healing reduced to a 'healing' action.

Except for one quest where we're given four basic healing actions and reminded how to use them as the fight progresses... I'm still salty haha.

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Originally Posted by Mikhaill

A fix would be having more intensive healing for us to do, honestly.
I don't mind DPSing but I prefer to heal lol.

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The flip side to this though, is how can they make the healing more intensive without making things too difficult for the average player? Keep in mind there are groups out there that struggle to put out the DPS to meet Titiania Normal's Add phases DPS check without the healers also going DPS mode for example. If you think the bulk of the average healers can handle more intense healing and also pitch in DPS to help pick up the slack when do get in those groups that are very clearly struggling on the DPS side as well, by all means ramp up the intensity. I don't think thats the case however.

As much as I would like to see things get harder in certain aspects of the game, just ramping up the intensity of the healing required would more than likely lead to the content getting an overall nerf to compensate for the slack decent healers are no longer able to pick up reliably.

If they fixed the buff/debuff system it wouldn't be as much of an issue. In xi as a healer you would heal plus contribute via spells like dia, slow, para, blind, haste, refresh, bar-, etc etc etc rather than dps and it was great. You felt more your role.

But in this game we are missing the crucial elements of buffing and debuffing, which they removed due to it being too complicated of a battle system for...well...ppl who don't wanna take the time to hit a single dps button on top of healing much less have to deal with 10 buffs and debuffs on top of healing.

Battle is basically dodging and dps without buff and debuff elements and you can really feel that its gone. Just like the elemental wheel. "it's too complicated" is a poor excuse because its really not even if you are the type of player who puts just slightly more in than minimal effort. I hate how they bring the games down to the minimum level of competency rather than trying to lift the players up to a higher level.

They could always just remove healer offensive spells to tell healers "hey we want you heal and only heal understand?"

Players: "but what about solo quests? We can't heal our enemies to death!"

SE: "That's why we gave you chocobos"

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Originally Posted by Kazrah

The challenge I think devs are facing here is that they want healer damage as an option, but not a requirement. The problem is that players make it a requirement to compensate for how bad their DPS is.

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Not true.

Using the website that shall not be named on encounters on EX and above at minimum ilv, if you took the required raid dps and removed healers from the equation, the dps would all have to be playing at 95th to over 100th percentile. We're talking better than padded world first players. This often isn't realistically possible and is far more than intended for EX.

Whatever Yoshi intends, his design team have accounted for healers doing some damage.

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Originally Posted by Kazrah

The challenge I think devs are facing here is that they want healer damage as an option, but not a requirement. The problem is that players make it a requirement to compensate for how bad their DPS is.

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Exactly! Say it again. Say it louder! I was in this inno group earlier and I thought it went well. There were a few deaths but that was because mechanics. Anyway. We defeat inno and leave the instance. Was waiting for re-que, about 3 minutes then I was kicked lol. I mean I wasn’t upset about it but I was on my Astro in nocturnal. I wondered what could it have been? My co-healer was whm. I was basically healing full time with the occasional whm afflatus here and there. Which is fine. I drew cards on CD. Whm never put regen on the tank so I was using intersection on CD as well as shielding the tank often. Dps when I could. Maybe they thought I wasn’t doing enough dps lol. I wasn’t mad but found it funny. I never stopped pressing buttons. And no I wasn’t spamming benefíc on the full hp tank and overhealing. I mean it is what it is. Just sucks they didn’t even give me an explanation why. But there goes the life of a healer nowadays. Since 1.0 I’ve been playing. This is the second time I’ve ever been kicked from a group. The first time was just because they wanted to invite their fc healer which was cool. I didn’t mind not care. This time I just don’t know why haha.

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Originally Posted by Ilenya

My focus on healing was literally until I got used to the job again. Then it's been back to DPSing constantly. YoshiP may want it, but it'll take more than healer changes for it to happen.

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Exactly this. Healers in FF14 are already built in a way that makes healing be the primary focus completely possible. They have been for a long time now. Its the fights that don't support this, what with most damage being completely avoidable, and the unavoidable damage coming in slow and predictable bursts. Incoming damage needs to be way higher and far more unpredictable to make healers focus on healing. In addition to this, SE only seems to know how to make DPS check wipe conditions, so every fight is a tight DPS race that further promotes healers and tanks forsaking healing and mitigation (via melding and gearing) for more dps.

The attitude people have doesn't help, either. Plenty of people seem to believe that a focus on healing, or being a "pure" healer, means no dps spells. This is completely wrong. When healing is the focus, doing damage becomes a reward, not a necessity. You're doing really good managing your MP and cooldown usage, and keeping everyone healthy? You get to throw a few dps spells in. Thd primary challenge is still in the healing, but then you get to feel good when you've done so well that you have time to throw a few rocks out, rather than feel like its expected of you to.

And to top it all off, since it's only the fight design that needs to change in order to create a focus on healing, that means you now have a variety of playstyles from fight to fight! One fight is a hectic high damage fight that relies upon your ability to manage your cooldowns and MP to keep everyone alive, the next fight is a more traditional fight with predictable damage and a dps check, making your damage contribution much more important. No one says it has to explicitly be one style or the other - the two styles of play can coexist and complement each other, you know?

[QUOTE=Connor;5120846]I don’t really get why they don’t just flat out say what they actually want healers to ‘do’ or ‘don’t do’. It’s undeniable that DPS is a huge part of the healer role by design, so why they don’t just come and say ‘healers should be dealing damage’.

Connor I agree. Basically look at Astro. It struggled because of the nerfs to their healing toolkit. Of course people complained and wanted buff which we got. You’re right our ogcds are so strong you really don’t need to use gcd heals. If they came out and said healers are suppose to deal damage too. They would lose allot of players in that role because although there are many who love the 90% dps and 10% healing. There are also many who only like to heal and rarely use their damage skills outside of msq solo quest. I don’t judge either side of it. Neither side has a strong enough argument to the other. Yoshi P has stated that healers aren’t required to dps. However the community says healers need to dps because why just sit there? Should always be casting something. Tanks don’t get a break, dps don’t get one either. They always pressing buttons so why should healers get special treatment? If they want healers to heal more they need to nerf all healers healing potency. Make us work for it. Honestly before Astro heals were buffed I enjoyed it. Weaker heals made it fun again. I was actually working hard to keep my tank alive during wall to wall pulls. I could barely dps because the tank was dropping massively every second. Literally spam healing. Just the adrenaline of not knowing if the heal will be enough. I liked that. Now it’s back to being powerful lol. I say nerf the healing potency across the board for each healer and increase the mp for damage spells. Bring back that decision making that made it fun. I know people might say that won’t fix anything but I believe if Yoshi P wants healers to heal more nerf the healing potency since they obviously are to scared to massively increase the damage taken. Just my opinion. No bully please :)

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Originally Posted by AnimaAnimus

If they fixed the buff/debuff system it wouldn't be as much of an issue. In xi as a healer you would heal plus contribute via spells like dia, slow, para, blind, haste, refresh, bar-, etc etc etc rather than dps and it was great. You felt more your role.

But in this game we are missing the crucial elements of buffing and debuffing, which they removed due to it being too complicated of a battle system for...well...ppl who don't wanna take the time to hit a single dps button on top of healing much less have to deal with 10 buffs and debuffs on top of healing.

Battle is basically dodging and dps without buff and debuff elements and you can really feel that its gone. Just like the elemental wheel. "it's too complicated" is a poor excuse because its really not even if you are the type of player who puts just slightly more in than minimal effort. I hate how they bring the games down to the minimum level of competency rather than trying to lift the players up to a higher level.

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It’s not a matter of complicated versus simple but a matter of usefulness. In XI people required red mages, bards, and geomancers to be around. In fact end game fights are balanced around a geomancer being present. The fights don’t need those jobs but people aren’t going to waste time if they don’t have to and make the fights more challenging, they’re simple going to bring those jobs. If fights truly don’t need them people will fill the slot with a DPS. The jobs are either required or no one will bring them.

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Originally Posted by AnimaAnimus

But in this game we are missing the crucial elements of buffing and debuffing, which they removed due to it being too complicated of a battle system for...well...ppl who don't wanna take the time to hit a single dps button on top of healing much less have to deal with 10 buffs and debuffs on top of healing.

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Buff/debuff gameplay can absolutely stay in FFXIV. The problem in the past is that the majority of buff/debuff applications were on DPS roles. NIN/DRG/SAM had resistance debuffs and BRD had party buffs/foe. Other than it made party composition imbalance and some of them jobs get favored. Being a debuffer while playing DPS role is very annoying to me.

Healer role never had other things to do until AST's buffs came into play. Apparently, buff was too overpowered and got nerf'd into ground as of now. They could easily shift buff/debuff responsibility to healers, but nah they choose to almost eliminate all of them.

On top that, DNC was born and got all that buff abilities... on DPS role. Addle, the debuff ability, is still on caster DPS only. DPS, a role that require a set rotation to play, who's job is to kill stuff for party ASAP, is given these support utilities while healers..............just heal when party take damage.

Now we are in 5.0, yet healer STILL got nothing to do other than throwing damage spell besides healing.

Healer role could specialize in all kinds of buff/debuff supportive gameplay other than support your party's health bar so that they don't die.

They can make it so that healer's dps won't matter that much, but they gotta give healers something else to do. If healing more is the solution, I don't know how well that can go.

The vision of healers being pure healers was and is never going to be a reality. If they wanted healers just healing or even healing for the majority of a encounter they would have to make massive changes on how they design fights.


Every boss would have to auto the tanks with the chance of the autos being a critical hit, they would have to have phases of heavy, consistent pulsing damage and less predetermined scripted damage where all damage done is reactionary.



Healers are still required to push their damage doing savage at minimum ilvl. If you just had your healers casting nothing but heals you would wipe to enrage every single time.


Redesigning how the game functions is a pretty monumental undertaking and I'm sure both the devs on the player base would rather they work on new content rather then dumping resources and time reworking how the game has always functioned. Healers will always be expected r to push damage.

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Originally Posted by Hezzlocks

And to top it all off, since it's only the fight design that needs to change in order to create a focus on healing, that means you now have a variety of playstyles from fight to fight! One fight is a hectic high damage fight that relies upon your ability to manage your cooldowns and MP to keep everyone alive, the next fight is a more traditional fight with predictable damage and a dps check, making your damage contribution much more important. No one says it has to explicitly be one style or the other - the two styles of play can coexist and complement each other, you know?

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I think this is most important. I like FF14 because I can contribute to DPS, but it'd be nice once in awhile to get a fight that focuses healing throughput. Or that asks people to use Crowd Control outside of stun/interrupt.

More variance in encounter design on a level dealing directly with toolkits, rather than positioning and coordination mechanics that operate independently, would greatly alleviate the stale feeling that has crept into this game's development loop.

As long as healers have a single button that causes damage, you will be expected -- and by the playerbase, required -- to properly make use of it. Especially in Savage.

Yoship's opinion is secondary to this absolute.

Just want to say that in an ideal world we would have true options. A ‘pure’ healer-like Job that focuses on healing, a DPS job that’s a healer, and a buff/debuff bot style healer. That way everyone can play a healing ‘style’ that fits the type of playstyle they’d prefer.

I feel like this how they’ve tried to approach job design for White Mage, Scholar and Astrologian respectively. But honestly, right now they feel very similar to me. You use your shield pre-pull (Adloquium/Excogitation, Divine Benison, Aspected Benefic / Celestial Intersection). Tank pulls enemy and you precast your DPS filler so you can weave card/Stratagem/PoM for the DPS boosts, DoT, filler filler filler. If tank is taking damage use your ‘restore most hp to the target’ bubble (Earthly Star, Asylum, Sacred Soil). Then if things really hit the fan, you use your ours special oGCD heal to undo most of the damage (there are so many I won’t list them all, but they all serve the exact same purpose of directly restoring a large amount of the target’s HP, like Lustrate/Essential Dignity/Tetragrammaton) Obviously that’s a very reductionist view, but at the base there’s very little actual variation between healers. They all follow the rigid conveyor belt of ‘use shield, DPS, use oGCD if target takes damage’. The only real type of variation we have is Astrologian’s cards. They’re an actual mechanic that breaks up the monotony of this conveyor, by taking the user out of the standard personal DPS mindset and into one where our attention moves towards the party. And I think this is why the card adjustments have hit players so hard; one of the few things healers has to do that was truly unique to that job, and they made it so you can easily fit it into that conveyor belt where everything follows a set path.

Started off as a normal post and I’ve gone way overboard, but what I’m trying to say is that I feel like there isn’t much to make healers feel unique or ‘special’ in their own way. White Mage has lillies, which just give it more damage. Scholar has the fairy I guess, but in all honesty there isn’t much resource management required for Aetherflow anymore, because even if you have none you can still heal 90% of attacks with Succor (Emergency Tactics and Recitation), Fey Blessing and maybe Whispering Dawn if you want to give the White Mage a few more Glares. Astrologian had cards but now it just has a damage up button, which wouldn’t be so much of an issue if we didn’t have something better before.

Tl;dr there’s not much true difference between healer playstyles and what differences there were are just being removed. Which wouldn’t be an issue if we were given something to replace what we lost. I think ultimately more players would join the healing role if we had more choice in what kind of healer we play, instead of all three being the same ‘healer that predominantly uses oGCDs and provides personal DPS’

Its interesting you mentioned wall to wall, that's also a problem in the game. It is not an intended mechanic, otherwise why not just have 60 enemies appear in one room. I think we need to wall off every single room, lower the potency and get back to basics.

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Originally Posted by Mistyregions

Its interesting you mentioned wall to wall, that's also a problem in the game. It is not an intended mechanic, otherwise why not just have 60 enemies appear in one room. I think we need to wall off every single room, lower the potency and get back to basics.

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Aggro changes, removal of falloff, and a specific boss' design are clear indicators group fights are openly embraced, encouraged, and required by development.

Sorry, single pull party is over. You learn to deal with packs or u bad.

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Originally Posted by Mistyregions

Its interesting you mentioned wall to wall, that's also a problem in the game. It is not an intended mechanic, otherwise why not just have 60 enemies appear in one room. I think we need to wall off every single room, lower the potency and get back to basics.

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Dungeons with locked doors every couple packs are awful. People should engage stuff based on their ability, not any arbitrary limits

I think the dev comments have probably been misconstrued a bit. We're extrapolating meaning from brief comments in translated interviews unless Yoshida gets on here to write an exhaustive forum post for clarity. My assumption is that they do expect healers to dps a bit - they even added the blood lily / misery mechanic to WHM this expansion - but they simply want to reduce emphasis on the dps side of healer kit which you see in the relatively few buttons it's afforded. Advanced players taking on Savage in the first week with no Phantasmagoria gear is a whole different thing; if he said he doesn't want players to feel pressure to dps, he's not necessarily including those people. Advanced players doing hardcore content are always expected to push themselves to the limit. For everyone else, in almost all of the content in the game, the healers have leeway to stand around not casting anything and it still lets the party clear. I don't agree with people slacking either but looking at it in this way you can't say the game design discourages it.

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Originally Posted by Kazrah

The challenge I think devs are facing here is that they want healer damage as an option, but not a requirement. The problem is that players make it a requirement to compensate for how bad their DPS is.

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In some cases? Sure. In most, the expectation is there because why should healers have a built in excuse to do literally nothing? Assuming all is well, content simply doesn't hit hard enough to warrant full time healing. This means you will have excessive amounts of downtime. I cannot exactly fault six (or even seven) other people getting a touch salty while they do what they can to kill the boss. Meanwhile, the healer may as well be AFK because they have nothing to heal and they aren't DPSing. You'll often find people are less... agitated provided the healer is contributing in some capacity.

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Originally Posted by Magnedeus

They could always just remove healer offensive spells to tell healers "hey we want you heal and only heal understand?"

Players: "but what about solo quests? We can't heal our enemies to death!"

SE: "That's why we gave you chocobos"

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They could. They would also immediately reverse the decision when queues as a whole die because no one wants to touch healers anymore. I mean, look at how much backlash they got for Shadowbringers reducing the healer DPS kit. Forcing healers into a pure healer role when this game doesn't have the outgoing damage to support it would be moronic.

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Originally Posted by wizzed

Or is Eden Savage an exception?

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If you're trying to do early clears of Savage, healer DPS is absolutely mandatory. Parties simply aren't geared enough for you to sit around and not add damage, which you honestly shouldn't do anyways because this game doesn't enforce high healing uptime. The same goes for Ultimate, which Yoshida has expressly stated healer DPS is required for any who want to clear it.

That said, the statement about pure healing was in reference to non-shield healing. Not "healers should only heal". He has recently said that he knows players enjoy optimizing damage on healers, and that he doesn't think healers should never contribute to damage. The developer estimates for healer DPS are just generally low - not the 4,000~5,000+ damage they're currently doing.

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Originally Posted by Kazrah

The challenge I think devs are facing here is that they want healer damage as an option, but not a requirement. The problem is that players make it a requirement to compensate for how bad their DPS is.

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This is incorrect. Healer DPS is seen as mandatory by the community because, otherwise, healers stand around for more than half of the content doing nothing. Even in the first two Ultimates, more than half of a healer's casts will be towards contributing damage, not healing. The outgoing damage in this game simply isn't high enough to warrant not DPSing on a healer, so the community expects healers to fill their copious amounts of downtime doing something productive instead of just standing around waiting for damage.

Not to mention, no other job is allowed to stand around doing nothing more than half the time. Personally, I don't think being a healer is a good enough excuse to support that stance. I think everyone should contribute equally towards a kill. Once healing requirements are satisfied, healers should contribute to damage just like everyone else is doing.

They should just add heal check for healers in party content. If your party isn't at X % of hp, your offensive spells are disabled unless you heal everyone to X %. Good healers will have no problems and will keep party up and have time to dps. Bad healers that just spam offensive spells till people die will fail.

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Originally Posted by Connor

Just want to say that in an ideal world we would have true options. A ‘pure’ healer-like Job that focuses on healing, a DPS job that’s a healer, and a buff/debuff bot style healer. That way everyone can play a healing ‘style’ that fits the type of playstyle they’d prefer.

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Small problem with that: Unless the other two healers are LITERALLY unable to put out enough healing to clear, why would anyone bring the job that can only heal and literally do absolutely nothing else?