Do healers have to be easy to play?

When picking up a healer class, it's already very easy. But that's alright, first not to scare away people from playing them, and secondly to not overwhelm new players. The DPS classes also start very easy.

The main difference is that while most DPS jobs get some kind of depth or complexity by getting their rotation expanded (some are quite easy to play even with less practice, but others at least need you to pay attention to do halfway decent DPS), healers don't.

Healers, instead of becoming more complex, become easier to play with higher level and better gear.

Now, not considering the DPS part of healing, but just the healing aspect, when you get stronger healing tools, especially the oGCD heals, healing obviously gets easier, because you obviously have more tools to heal damage faster. Even though the encounters (talking about casual content here, because in savage you would try more than the minimum anyway) don't become that much harder. But this is natural.

Adding DPS, it doesn't even get harder directly. You can misjudge when it's safe to DPS, but when you're not sure if it is (because you're new for example), you can just choose not to, and cast a safety heal instead. Meaning, as long as you put in some effort, it's perfectly alright not to maximize your DPS as a new player, or in new content, or with a struggling party for example. Like some people give the advice 'at least try to keep up your DoT'.

What I don't understand about this all is how there are players that still find healing very challenging, when you can get away with only ever casting your GCD heals - and take that as a reason to be against healing being more involving.

I mean, you can't make healing casual content so hard that new (or bad) players are totally unable to clear the content. And if all your party members don't know the mechanics you will have a difficult time keeping them alive even if you're a veteran. So the actual direct healing part of it must stay manageable. Only the 'becoming more efficient' part of it can become more complex. Things that get you more time to DPS. Which in turn could also become a little more complex without making playing healers become that much more difficult.

But there are STILL topics about how healer DPS is already challenging enough as it is, and how people couldn't keep up if it were even slightly more complex (even if it was in the past and people managed with less oGCD heals as well). How having any kind of proactive instead of reactive healing would be too much for them to handle (that's why some ASTs don't use Earthly Star I guess). There are people who, even though they would welcome a little more complexity, defend this attitude by saying that at least one healer should stay very simple for the casual players.
Of course people suggest that this healer should be WHM. Even though WHM would be the best example for more complex DPS, BECAUSE it has the least buttons and no extra mechanic to concentrate on. But no, it absolutely NEEDS to be easy and accessible, and even more so at max level - it's not allowed to need some thinking to get more than the basics out of it.

A DPS player that doesn't care about their rotation just presses whatever buttons they want to. But when there are suggestions about making healer DPS a little more engaging, people cry about how they want healers to be really easy to play. Healers would become a bit harder to master, but for players who have no interest in that not much would change, wouldn't it? It would only change for those who find pressing Glare/Broil/Malefic too boring.

What do you think about the difficulty of the healers?

It's very easy to fulfill the healer baseline role. If you stood there spamming your heals you'd essentially be maximizing your contribution to healing. Problem is, overhealing, by it's nature doesn't contribute to the progression of your party.

In FFXIV's healing there is barely any triage, since all healer job posses very strong and cheap AoE healing spells that allow players to blanket the whole raid with a single cast. MP management has also become much more accessible with strong tools to recover MP essentially integrated into the Job design. (Draw restores MP, Aetherflow/Energy Drain, Free MP healing abilities such as Lillies, Celestial Opposition, Fairy, etc.)

These changes make so that healers are allowed much more time to do anything but heal.

They have the MP, they have the time.

Healer design is essentially made so healers have time and resources to spare. Which in turn makes comparatively easier for them to juggle between keeping track of health bars, boss mechanics, and their own dps.

I suppose the designer team thought we would be overwhelmed if we had to constantly be triaging through wounded and dodging aoe at the same time.

That being said, I think the current game. design of healers does allow for an expansion of the gameplay during the prevalent healing downtime. In fact, healers already have distinct unique things to do, implied or not, during downtime:

WHM is a nuker, SCH is a debuffer and AST is a buffer.

They could stand to have that part of their gameplay expanded.

This is what I don’t understand. There are three healers. One can be easy one intermediate and the third could be difficult. Some people enjoy more complexity. Give it to them and you still have white mage for easy healing. This helps everyone.

The same can be for all roles easy intermediate and difficult. This would do more for player interest. Also it doesn’t mean one or another is more powerful it just means the skill level to play effectively is higher.

If healers are going to be given a larger dps toolkit, shouldn't dps also be given a larger healing toolkit as well? There's a balance issue here. Why play a glass cannon dps that can't survive a fight without a tank and a healer, if you can be a healer that's almost as good in damage but much easier to keep alive? Perhaps BLM should be given Physick, Esuna and some AOE-heals?

I don't think the mechanics of healing itself should be difficult.
Healing doesn't have to be hard. When that's the backbone of keeping the party alive it's fine that inefficient healing can still get you through most content.

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Originally Posted by EmmetOtter

If healers are going to be given a larger dps toolkit, shouldn't dps also be given a larger healing toolkit as well? There's a balance issue here. Why play a glass cannon dps that can't survive a fight without a tank and a healer, if you can be a healer that's almost as good in damage but much easier to keep alive? Perhaps BLM should be given Physick, Esuna and some AOE-heals?

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Simply put, no.

Enhancing healers' damage kits does not expand their scope. Healers can currently deal damage. There is no reason that a more interesting set of damage abilities must increase their offensive output. Adding significant healing resources to damage classes would expand their scope. Equating the two is fallacious.

Additionally, healers are the only role in the game that face significant periods of time where they are not engaged in their primary role. To occupy this downtime (which can be up to 100% of GCDs in a fight) healers are given a handful of basic attacks with no interconnectedness. Tanks and dps are given robust offensive capabilities that interact with one another so that they are meaningfully engaged at all times. There's no reason for healers to be condemned to repetitive and tedious play.

Something the OP isn't quite clear on: healers should be easy to learn but harder to master

We have conjurer, that is the tutorial healer. Learn on conjurer, and then new healers should be able to pick up the other jobs. This ensures a solid base with a healing kit, and hopefully encouraged dps in downtime.
the healer jobs are just that-jobs, they should be engaging with unique kits and playstyles. by all means make WHM the easiest healer as it has conjurer as a base class. But WHM must be more difficult than babies first healer, its a full job, it should be harder than that. Otherwise you will just get bored whm's

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Originally Posted by glamazon

This is what I don’t understand. There are three healers. One can be easy one intermediate and the third could be difficult. Some people enjoy more complexity. Give it to them and you still have white mage for easy healing. This helps everyone.

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It doesn't help me though. I enjoy the aesthetics of WHM. I would also enjoy a healer that does more than cast a simple heal after a raid-wide AoE.

What I mean is, why do the WHM mains that want more engaging gameplay have to get punished? Why would I have to change to another healer if I want not to fall asleep while playing?

IF one healer must be simple, then either only CNJ until you get WHM, or whatever new healer will get released instead of an existing one.

My point in the OP was that as long as the basic task of healing stays the same, and it must, the 'skill ceiling' can be higher without hurting the less skilled players. The problem is that whenever someone suggests to give healers some sort of more complex DPS or buffs, people complain that it gets too difficult for them, even though it actually doesn't, because it only gets more complex for those who are willing to do more than the basics.

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Originally Posted by glamazon

The same can be for all roles easy intermediate and difficult. This would do more for player interest. Also it doesn’t mean one or another is more powerful it just means the skill level to play effectively is higher.

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Preventative healing (i.e shields) is arguably easier than reactive healing. Blanketing a raid with shields to mitigate a player's mistakes before they happen is easier than reacting to player error whilst the healer is also having to navigate the same mechanics.

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Originally Posted by GrimGale

WHM is a nuker, SCH is a debuffer and AST is a buffer.

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In theory that should work but the issue would be how the WHM's damage is weighed against the buffs and the debuffs.
As the party size grows the collective buffed damage of the group/debuffed boss would easily outweigh the WHM damage output otherwise you'd have to scale WHM through the roof which would make them OP solo.
It would just lead to another mandatory SCH/AST meta.

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Originally Posted by Jaelommiss

Simply put, no.

Enhancing healers' damage kits does not expand their scope. Healers can currently deal damage. There is no reason that a more interesting set of damage abilities must increase their offensive output. Adding significant healing resources to damage classes would expand their scope. Equating the two is fallacious.

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What's the point then? Asking for more buttons to push only to get the same damage output isn't beneficial, let alone "more interesting". Additional complexity for the sake of more complexity is a terrible reason.

First, let’s face it, pure healer princesses are a rare breed. They make a lot of noise here but if you look at the ratio in game, they are pretty much inexistent (at least on Chaos). I see a specimen only now and then, something like once every 30 DFs and in PF their lifetime is around 3 wipes so doesn't matter. Thus, from my point of view, this an overrate problem. The real issue is that SE listen to the people making the most noise.

Now to address the problem, I don’t mind pure healer. What I dislike are dead weight. And a healer overhealing the hell out of the party or just standing there doing nothing is exactly that, a dead weight. And it’s not only healers, it can be no-rotation DPS, or no-aggro tank.

Currently if I face such a weight in a party, I do my best to prevent them to die out of boredom. For instance, as a tank, if the healer is a princess, I won’t use my cd nor avoid aoes.

OP, you’re right by saying that basic healing should be easy, and I think SE thinks the same. The problem is that the current implementation of this is: “heal requirement is very low”. It implies that the healer minimal job is almost non-existent, thus allowing pure healer to do nothing.

There is (at least) another solution to fulfil this requirement: “heal requirement is a full part job, except if you follow [other mechanism]”. [other mechanism] can be DPS, or cleaning buffs, or whatever, as long as you smash buttons. With such a solution, the healer has the choice. If he’s not confident doing something else, he can spam heal and it will work. On the other hand, if he’s confident, he can follow [other mechanism] to bring something else to the party.

Here are some examples on the top of my head to implement such a solution.

• A damage buff on the mobs which is cleared if the healer attacks it. So, the healer either DPS or needs to heal more. The buff comes back every 2-3 gcd, it could stack too.
• DPS ability with a very short (2 gcd) damage debuff. So, either you heal the none mitigated incoming damage or you DPS to decrease the incoming damage.
• Increase overhealing aggro by a lot, so it prevents heal spamming and force people to be aware of the party status.
• Increase the cost of all healing abilities (or disable auto MP regen) and add MP regen to DPS abilities. No DPS no MP no Heal.
• You get aggro by not casting. So, if people do nothing they get aggro. (this is maybe not a good idea)

Idea which don’t force but encourage DPS:

• Heal ability which potency increase the more you DPS.
• Healer rotation, with 2 damages at the beginning and a big heal at the end.
• Leech healing. Percentage of your DPS is converted to heal. (this could be the base for a whole new heal job)

Do you have more ideas to force heal to choose between easy heal spam or complex mechasim that brings something to the party?

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Originally Posted by EmmetOtter

What's the point then? Asking for more buttons to push only to get the same damage output isn't beneficial, let alone "more interesting". Additional complexity for the sake of more complexity is a terrible reason.

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Not the same thing though.

You're assuming "Casting Glare and then comboing to Glare II will deal the same damage as casting Glare on it's own" which is incorrect, that's not the argument, as that system would be redundant.

Rather it would be anew system relative to an old system that would have the same output.
e.g. Glare has a potency of 250, Glare II has a potency of 350.
This way, comboing does deal more damage, but compared to the current system where Glare = 300 potency, it's the same output.
This could lead to greater DPS optimisation, and allow those who get more 'downtime' to pump out more damage than those who don't.

Obviously a simply 1>2 combo wouldn't actually be much more interesting to do, it's just to illustrate the numbers.



Personally I think WHM could take a page out of BLM's book with it's AF/UI, only instead it would apply to the healing/dps split.
We already see a taste in this with Lilies, using heals powers up a DPS spell.
What if using Glare granted a 3s buff that increased healing output by 3%, and could stack up to 3 times to 9% along with increasing the duration to 9s.
e.g. 1 Glare = 3s of +3% healing
2 Glares = 6s of +6%
3 Glares = 9s of +9%
Once you hit that 9s buff, it locks in place and can't be extended further until it reaches 0.

Therefore you're encouraged to get three Glares out in a row as often as possible to optimise healing, which in turn allows you to DPS more because you were able to heal more. But it would effectively discourage you spamming Glare more than 3 times because you want to actually take advantage of the healing buff.

Allow Holy to extend the duration of this buff without actually applying it or boosting it. Maybe by 2s each cast so that it will eventually run out still.
Maybe make it so this buff is only applicable when casting Glare on a target inflicted with Dia.
Then add in one new DPS skill that can spend a Lily, which a higher potency than Glare, but doesn't apply this healing buff.

You then want to open with a Dia, Glare x3 and then heal, and if you don't need to heal too much, you can spend a Lily for more DPS until you need to apply a Glare again.

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Originally Posted by EmmetOtter

What's the point then? Asking for more buttons to push only to get the same damage output isn't beneficial, let alone "more interesting". Additional complexity for the sake of more complexity is a terrible reason.

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Interesting gameplay is dependent on decision making. Having multiple options is a necessary component of decision making. Adding additional buttons isn't interesting in itself, but is a foundational requirement for creating interesting gameplay.

You could take every combat class in the game, work out its average potency per GCD, and replace everything they have with a button that deals that exact amount of damage. When they reach a point that their average potency per GCD would increase, upgrade that one button to reflect the new amount.

Consider the following possibilities:
A 30 sec dot (Dia) and a direct attack spell (Glare)

A 1-2 spell combo (Glare w/ 2.0* sec casting time then Glare II w/ 2.5 sec casting time) that grants +5% healing potency for 10 secs, stacking up to five times. A 30 sec dot (Dia). A strong GCD spell (Glare III w/ 2.5 sec casting time) with a 15 sec CD that is always a crit against targets affected by Dia and grants +20% healing potency on the next healing spell within 15 secs on a crit. Glare III's CD is reset and its next cast becomes instant after spending a lily. A 60 sec CD that allows +healing stacks to be consumed, granting -10% healing and +10% damage per stack for 15 seconds.

If if they were both balanced to deal equal damage and healing I would prefer the second one because it's vastly more interactive.


*Necessary because combos are server validated

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Originally Posted by Jaelommiss

Interesting gameplay is dependent on decision making. Having multiple options is a necessary component of decision making. Adding additional buttons isn't interesting in itself, but is a foundational requirement for creating interesting gameplay.

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In addition to this, more decision making allows for more personal expression and better rewards. If you look at how SCH was in the past. You had twice the amount of timers to keep track of, it was more complicated and harder to play. But when you did it right you were really rewarded by performing better than your colleagues SCHs. Currently, one dot and one attack leaves no room for improvements, once you're good enough to manage 2 buttons you'll get bored since there's nothing more to optimize (in your dps rotation).

Healers in the leveling process should be easy to learn. However, they should be progressively expand on their complexity as you gain levels.

I don't get this idea that WHM is the easy healer. So it should held back to just Glare spam or just direct heals?

Honestly the only healer right now that takes any semblance of a braincell to use is AST and that's just because of its cards.

As for the DPS part of their kits, I think they could be expanded on. Spamming one spell is really dull and honestly doesn't make sense. Yes they aren't supposed to be DPS levels of complexity however, it would greatly make the lack of actual healing less boring.

SE will never make healing difficult simply because bad players will never get better. If they never learn how to properly time their CDs, then they will likely not pass said content if they increase the damage to match a pure healer aesthetic.

So what are we left with? Given the design of the game in general, downtime is inevitable. Once a fight is memorized, all there's left is to optimize it which in a healers case, is to DPS more while planning you and your cohealer's oGCDs out to cover it.

Healers should have more complexity in different ways. It doesn't necessarily have to be as difficult as AST.

What I miss about SCH is balancing DoT timers with your oGCD healing, but that's gone. They could have proc-based spells from using oGCDs.

WHM could be the healer with an actual combo where their GCD heals reward them with a spender like we have with Misery. They could expand on that with ST ones or even a DoT lily spell.

Point being, that DPS and healing should go hand in hand, not entirely seperate. It shouldn't be focus on spamming one button, then dropping it for GCD healing because emergency. It should be a mesh that rewards your for learning and optimizing it.

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Originally Posted by Ilyrian

In theory that should work but the issue would be how the WHM's damage is weighed against the buffs and the debuffs.
As the party size grows the collective buffed damage of the group/debuffed boss would easily outweigh the WHM damage output otherwise you'd have to scale WHM through the roof which would make them OP solo.
It would just lead to another mandatory SCH/AST meta.

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I always hear this argument and I think it could be fixed with a trait at Level 1. Lets call it 'Conjurer's Call' and say that for lore reasons you reach out to the elementals to help protect your allies granting an increase in damage potency for each person added to your party. This would make the WHM personal dps grow just like the raidwide buffs of your other healing counterparts.

Everything becomes easier with gear. This allows players at different skill levels to clear the same fight.

A bigger problem is that healing doesn't really matter all that much. Raid wipes matter. Individual deaths much less so, especially if you can just brute force it with superior dps. Here's a scary thought: if there was a hard cap on the number of rez uses per pull shared amongst your entire team, then even the 'baseline' act of healing is something valuable, and every would-be fatal misstep averted by your healers carries all that more weight.

There also needs to be an emphasis placed on giving both healers something to actively heal at the same time, such that it's impossible to fulfill both tasks with one healer alone.

Lastly, resource management needs to be a thing. Every job has a second resource system outside of MP. Cooldowns and resources are superfluous unless fights actively force their attrition.

Healing needs to have value. But that comes from having there be consequences for poor healing.

The easier you make something, the worse people who aren't that interested in improvement become. They don't suddenly become useful players. They only want to put the bare minimum in and all you've done is made that minimum even lower. They also develop the "it's easy who cares?" attitude as they're carried through content and bad habits become ingrained because you can reach lv80 without anything forcing you to adapt.

Heal dps is 2-3 buttons and the large majority of healers are still terrible at it and putting out poor healing at the same time. Low dps uptime, no idea how to plan movement, heal sniping and overhealing for light damage but falling to pieces and running around panicking when real damage or deaths happen, barely utilizing oGcd's and so on.
You could make healing even easier and those players would actually get even worse, which seems to be the direction we're going.

Accessibility as a means to boost player numbers is a trap many companies fall into. The reason it even works temporarily is that they have a great game at the core which carries their success, but rather than focus on and develop that core for the people who love it, they tear it to bits, water it down and hand it out like fast food.
The issue is they've pushed the veterans away from many activities and the remaining players get easily bored because they don't even like the activity that much and will demand easier and easier content while continuing to put minimum effort in. It's a steady decline. WoW is a good example of this, they're still going but their subscriber numbers are like a ghost of their past glory and very few people will claim WoW is an amazing game anymore. It'd be sad if FF14 went that way in the years to come.

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Originally Posted by Ilyrian

Preventative healing (i.e shields) is arguably easier than reactive healing. Blanketing a raid with shields to mitigate a player's mistakes before they happen is easier than reacting to player error whilst the healer is also having to navigate the same mechanics.

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In theory yes, in practice the shields are currently so minor that you end up having to heal people's mistakes anyway which causes you to end up in the same situation as a reactive healer, just with an extra GCD wasted.


I'm in the camp of "I don't care which healer becomes the easy one, as long as the others are more engaging." If they want to make SCH the "tutorial healer" go ahead, they already removed most of it's interesting kit anyway.

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Originally Posted by Darkmoonrise

First, let’s face it, pure healer princesses are a rare breed. They make a lot of noise here but if you look at the ratio in game, they are pretty much inexistent (at least on Chaos). I see a specimen only now and then, something like once every 30 DFs and in PF their lifetime is around 3 wipes so doesn't matter. Thus, from my point of view, this an overrate problem. The real issue is that SE listen to the people making the most noise.

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They are a lot more common in leveling dungeons but yes, even on Light they are rather rare. There do however seem to be quite a lot more of them on NA data centers.

Healers need all to be able to heal a party.

Healers need interesting dynamic rotations in their healing which correlates to how dps does damage.

If you want us to dps why only give us three dps spells? We need to be the buffers and debuffers and crowd control ( yes make cc great again)

I don’t mind dps to help but I want dynamic systems to support that not mashing one button after I dot

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

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How would you make healing harder?

I'll have to elaborate more later, but I find healing to be technically the easiest role to play. This is because they have the lowest requirement out of all the roles. However, it is also the only role where it is the competency of their group that dictates this requirement. As a result of this, DPS requirements for casual content have to be very loose, and this makes things easier for healers as well. It is just how it is. However, this does not mean that they cannot give healers more to do. SCH and WHM job gauges in particular collect a lot of dust in casual content, and it should be the first place they address when it comes to making healers more engaging.

All I know is spamming one ability and dropping a dot twice a minute is mind numbering. And sadly the downtime will only lengthen, and the job get progressively more boring, the further you progress on content because we are getting stronger relative to said content. The better we get at healing the more downtime we will have. It's the only role that feels worse the stronger you become.

Either the devs need to give us an actually engaging and fun damage kit or they need to increase our support role so we have something fun to do when we don't need to heal.

I think a big part of the issue is the lack of tangible reward for the effort of actually "mastering" a job, particularly a healing one.

Like I'd say WHM is maybe the hardest healer to play perfectly, if only because of it's lack of movement/weaving opportunity. I used to prog on WHM then swap to AST once I was comfy, now I just skip it entirely though. AST is so much easier to move with, it's nearly a ranged physical dps at this point. SCH has the inherent dps loss of Ruin II but if you're sticking an Energy Drain in there you can directly offset and even another oGCD usage which saves a future healing GCD can be a worthwhile return on your weaving/movement investment.

I think WHM basically needs a reason to exist now. It's the tedious healer, at least at the high end. Bringing all the rDPS of... the other, more flexible healers.

I think if they want to keep WHM as immobile as it is at least give them something for it. Like for consecutive Glare casts with no break for movement or a weave add 2% potency or something. If they're gonna be a turret embrace the turret fully, if they aren't then ease up and give them the Malefic cast time reduction.

As to a direct response to the OP I think the only issue with adding complexity now is that people have already leveled these jobs. If we take WHM (which is the one I most often see as a given healer's only capped job) and make it more complex are we not kind of pulling the rug from under them? Don't get me wrong, personally I am very much in favor of pulling that rug, by all means people can surely learn if they try, but SE seems very much against asking people to try at all in any capacity.

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Originally Posted by Veis_Alveare

Like I'd say WHM is maybe the hardest healer to play perfectly, if only because of it's lack of movement/weaving opportunity. I used to prog on WHM then swap to AST once I was comfy, now I just skip it entirely though. AST is so much easier to move with, it's nearly a ranged physical dps at this point.

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I almost regret picking up AST as an alt because going back to WhM after playing it makes you start to dislike WhM. AST is just smooth to play, it flows and works, it keeps you busy and Lightspeed is an amazing ability. WhM at high end is sort of like that old broken piece of machinery you have where you've developed a few tricks over time to make it semi-functional. You get used to it, but when you finally get a brand new replacement you wonder how on earth you ever put up with it.

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Originally Posted by Veis_Alveare

I think if they want to keep WHM as immobile as it is at least give them something for it. Like for consecutive Glare casts with no break for movement or a weave add 2% potency or something. If they're gonna be a turret embrace the turret fully, if they aren't then ease up and give them the Malefic cast time reduction.

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They need to move away from the immobile thing to be honest. Badly. Black Mage is a turret and it's far more mobile than WhM. They should be using BLM as an example of how to do turret caster correctly.
They can add whatever potency they like, but clipping and limping all over the arena with slidecasts is not fun gameplay. And fun gameplay should be what matters most.