Could a "fully offensive healer" work in FFXIV?

Hi, this post is coming from a healing-averse player who has played many MMOs and only enjoyed healing in one narrow moment of the MMO space: When the idea of "a healer that heals through dealing damage" was novel, accepted in a few games, and hadn't had all the fun beaten out of it by WoW overthinking its endgame.

To heal, I really only need one condition to be met.

I either need to be focusing 99% on party members and not dealing damage, or I need to be blasting the enemies with the damage dealt then passively radiating into healing that hits the party.

What I won't do is switch back and forth, constantly, between targeting enemies and targeting the players. Maybe that means I never try a healing job in FFXIV. If so, I accept that.

For a time, chloromancer in RIFT and Discipline priest in WoW generally worked through the "healing through damage" way. As I understand it, chloromancer never changed, and WoW again overthought its endgame and needed a "high skill floor healer" (that then wiped learning parties constantly), and turned discipline healing into that.

Early in MMOs, when my lasting impressions and expectations were formed, I was a healer when healers just healed, and the social compact was everything the party did well just made the healer less stressed out, so the healer would treat the party well and vice versa.

Then healers wanted "challenge," and here we are today with white mages DPSing and discipline priests needing to constantly swap between enemies and allies.

So I know there isn't a healer in FFXIV that isn't expected to deal damage, and that's fine, I can always just... never heal in FFXIV.

But man, wouldn't it be cool if we got a choloromancer-like job? Have we heard anything about the new job in this direction? Would this even work in FFXIV? The damage doesn't have to be DPS job level, but I mean... healing through damage is a solid gimmick that I miss!

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Originally Posted by Omedon

Hi, this post is coming from a healing-averse player who has played many MMOs and only enjoyed healing in one narrow moment of the MMO space: When the idea of "a healer that heals through dealing damage" was novel, accepted in a few games, and hadn't had all the fun beaten out of it by WoW overthinking its endgame.

To heal, I really only need one condition to be met.

I either need to be focusing 99% on party members and not dealing damage, or I need to be blasting the enemies with the damage dealt then passively radiating into healing that hits the party.

What I won't do is switch back and forth, constantly, between targeting enemies and targeting the players. Maybe that means I never try a healing job in FFXIV. If so, I accept that.

For a time, chloromancer in RIFT and Discipline priest in WoW generally worked through the "healing through damage" way. As I understand it, chloromancer never changed, and WoW again overthought its endgame and needed a "high skill floor healer" (that then wiped learning parties constantly), and turned discipline healing into that.

Early in MMOs, when my lasting impressions and expectations were formed, I was a healer when healers just healed, and the social compact was everything the party did well just made the healer less stressed out, so the healer would treat the party well and vice versa.

Then healers wanted "challenge," and here we are today with white mages DPSing and discipline priests needing to constantly swap between enemies and allies.

So I know there isn't a healer in FFXIV that isn't expected to deal damage, and that's fine, I can always just... never heal in FFXIV.

But man, wouldn't it be cool if we got a choloromancer-like job? Have we heard anything about the new job in this direction? Would this even work in FFXIV? The damage doesn't have to be DPS job level, but I mean... healing through damage is a solid gimmick that I miss!

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Healers in FFXIV can & do dps additionally in groups/alliances/raids.

Your priority though is to “heal” & sustain the party’s flow while you can.

Healer’s/Tank’s dps will never par/surpass that of actual dps jobs, but is expect for you to help out with dps nonetheless if able to.

Never grow cocky of a fully defensive tank, some slight error can wipe a whole party.

SE (FFXIV) is it seems way too obsessed with the idea of shield/HoT healers. Would be great if they spice up the ways healers heal a bit but yeah...r.i.p. geomancer...we will never forget your totems...

LOL

Most healers just stand there and do nothing when there's nothing heal as it is, let alone try to work their healing around DPS spells like every competent healer would. If you introduced an offensive healer like they had in Warhammer Online, people would be confused and confuddled and completely lost.

Hmmm...

It's an interesting idea, but there's a lot of factors to consider to ensure it didn't become the immediate "go-to" Healer that becomes the defacto choice for all groups:
- The DPS an "all-damage" healer job does would have to stay at the same ceiling that current healing classes can do
- This means that even though a player spends all of their time doing dps, that their individual attacks are ultimately weaker, otherwise they'd be doing way too much dps on top of healing the party
- The reason for this is effectively math; if someone doing dps is also healing then that means they're almost literally doubling their numerical worth (doing dps points as well as healing points), making anything outside of that job pointless

Now about the caveat you mentioned: "What I won't do is switch back and forth, constantly, between targeting enemies and targeting the players."

Then you also mention: "For a time, chloromancer in RIFT and Discipline priest in WoW generally worked through the "healing through damage" way."

Does this mean you don't mind if there's some clicking back and forth, as long as it's not every other action?

I ask because that's another important balancing factor; there has to be some interaction with players and enemies where you need to select which players to heal, because if it's instead something like an automatic heal to either large portions or an entire team, then even that would make it entirely too over-powered. As it stands now, healers have to actively choose who to heal in which situations, and yes, everyone does have AOE heals but that also requires team coordination and awareness to really take advantage of (little Timmy that runs off to a corner by himself likely isn't going to get healed, lol).

So with all of that said, I'm certainly not against the idea, but it's definitely something that needs to be well thought-out and balanced so it doesn't over-shadow the rest of the healing jobs.

I think FULL offensive healer would be quite challenging I think you could add a healer that gives a sense of it far more than usual. For example one idea in the dark healer thread, I had suggested an offensive heal that would prevent damage from the target to your party (so it functions in raids too). Now it would need careful balance, can't be purely this type of healing, but it would add an element of enfeebling and such. There were curses and other concepts to give greater sense of offense, and even some healing spells that could damage enemies.

I would love to read someone try to make a full offensive healer though, sounds like a fun thought experiment.

I briefly dabbled in Chloromancer when I played RIFT but didn't care for it and quickly stopped using it so I can't give it a good evaluation.

I did main Discipline in WoW from mid-Wrath through WoD and then split time between Disc and Holy in Legion. I can't speak for what it's like now (though I imagine it's still fairly similar to what it was in Legion since that's when they decided to make it the high skill cap spec) but I doubt it was ever anything like you want to imagine.

Discipline was never a purely offensive healer. It was mainly a shield healer until Legion (we got called Bubble Bots). Damage through healing was added in MoP and was mostly intended as a sort of sustain between burst damage windows. Get close to the burst damage window and you'd switch to getting shields up on everyone (or at least as many as possible).

It was a balancing mess for the devs as they tried to sort out the identity they wanted the spec to have. Because it was going to be dealing more damage than the other healers, they had to make the healing weaker so Disc didn't become the "only best choice". They kept going through variations of smart healing (the heal would land on a random player near target, the heal would land on a random player near target at less than 100% HP, etc.) and finally gave up on that part when they decided to turn it into the high skill ceiling spec.

With the Legion rework, you generally had to heal or shield someone first so they would get a buff that would allow them to receive passive healing when you dealt damage so you were still spending a significant amount of time healing instead of DPSing. You had to keep renewing that buff if you wanted the healing from damage to continue. Again not certain what it's like now (suppose I could browse Warcraft Logs to get an idea) but I can promise it's still not a pure offensive healer.

Even as a mixed healer type, I don't see it fitting into this game well as a standard job. It could work with BLU, especially if intended for soloing content like Basic Instinct is, but that's about as far as I would go.

If you don't enjoy healing, don't sweat it. Stick to DPS or tank or whatever you do enjoy. Those of us who do enjoy healing will still be there.

Full on offensive healer would become mandatory, much like disc priests and holy paladins are in WoW.

They're taken because they put out good healing AND damage to beat enrage timers in cutting edge guilds.

I'd rather not see that here.

focusing on party memebers 99% of the time will not and should never happen in any mmo.
It leads to healers having a poor solo game when they need to do levelling or msq, and in scripted encounters like ff14, boredom

ff14's healers are combat medics who dps and heal and we have seen good healing design in the past. 4.0 sch where they could get great uptime through dots while still putting out healing and 2.0/3.0 whm who could buff powerful regens and let them tick while doing damage.

Even now, 70-90% of a healer's gcd casts in this game are offensive spells. Only we have 1 dot and 1 nuke attack when we had much better options. Needless to say, between that and the lack of challenge, many healers have quit in SHB citing boredom and destroying 2 of the jobs, and barely improving the third

given ff14's healing floor and ceiling are extremely low and the devs tendency to make healers an afterthought, healing in this game would likely leave OP on the side of "we need more incoming damage because this is low and boring"
Which tbf is true but most healers want higher incoming damage and randomness and more importantly more downtime (non healing/where everyone is healed) tools

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Originally Posted by Omedon

Hi, this post is coming from a healing-averse player who has played many MMOs and only enjoyed healing in one narrow moment of the MMO space: When the idea of "a healer that heals through dealing damage" was novel, accepted in a few games, and hadn't had all the fun beaten out of it by WoW overthinking its endgame.

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Warhammer Online's Warrior priest is the one that I bring up when this kind of discussion arrises. Using melee attacks to generate charges for it's OGCD/Insta toolkit whilst also having basic but time inefficient heals to fall back onto when needed as well. It'd be something that would be simpler to tune than purely generating healing auras through DPS.

At this point in time I'm honestly fine with SE trying absolutely anything vaguely bold and fresh with healers though. I really don't care what it is. A move towards buffing, debuffing, disc priest style healing auras, utility through dps. I just want SE's devs to try something so I'm not facing another expansion with a nigh 10 to 1 ratio of Glare vs anything else even in Savage content.

The current state of healer gameplay is laughable at best. Can you imagine the uproar if a new DPS job got added that pressed 1 button 200+ times in a Savage encounter with the second place ability coming in at under 30 presses?

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Originally Posted by Imora

Full on offensive healer would become mandatory, much like disc priests and holy paladins are in WoW.

They're taken because they put out good healing AND damage to beat enrage timers in cutting edge guilds.

I'd rather not see that here.

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It would be a good thing precisely because the non-dps healers would effectively deleted, and hopefully then reworked to become full dps healers.

Scholar used to have an easy-but-not-too-boring rotation up through Heavensward, typically around 7 buttons in single target fights, which was whittled away in Stormblood and then yanked out altogether in Shadowbringers, for an up to 3 button rotation now in single target fights. As the healers have gradually become more boring, there are more people now who don't DPS at all, because that is what the developers are encouraging, and I can't blame the players.

A significant challenge fully offensive healer design would face is a large amount of untargetable-boss periods where it's expected that you heal or shield up.

Healing through damage can work because white mages do that with Assize and astrologians do it with Earthly Star.

Because the fights are mostly scripted and the incoming damage isn't usually constant, it makes more sense that you are dealing damage all of the time and just weave in your heals when there is some scripted damage.

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Originally Posted by PondHollow

It would be a good thing precisely because the non-dps healers would effectively deleted, and hopefully then reworked to become full dps healers.

Scholar used to have an easy-but-not-too-boring rotation up through Heavensward, typically around 7 buttons in single target fights, which was whittled away in Stormblood and then yanked out altogether in Shadowbringers, for an up to 3 button rotation now in single target fights. As the healers have gradually become more boring, there are more people now who don't DPS at all, because that is what the developers are encouraging, and I can't blame the players.

A significant challenge fully offensive healer design would face is a large amount of untargetable-boss periods where it's expected that you heal or shield up.

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Not everyone wants to play a dps healer.

I know I kinda like healing with a side of DPS, not a green mage.

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Originally Posted by Imora

Not everyone wants to play a dps healer.

I know I kinda like healing with a side of DPS, not a green mage.

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This is a fair enough view, the issue is that the game just doesn't support this mentality unless you're spending large swathes of time stood doing nothing. Our kits are too healing heavy vs basically anything outside of Ultimate prog.

IMHO the solution here isn't just more of a DPS focus within healer kits, but rather a split of selfish dps healers vs buffing/debuffing healers that are effectively just dropping their potency on someone else.

Again, literally anything is better than sitting there pressing the same single button over and over again for 30 seconds at a time. That is not remotely compelling gameplay by any stretch of the word.

problem with dps healers is then you have people using them for the queue times and not because they can actually heal properly.

unfortunately, there isnt much of a happy medium

Sounds like WoW classic facemelt0r aka shadow priest. :) The problem is such class should never be capable to be a full healer because it will be a replacement for other healers and other dps.


Cheers

Here's an idea
Remove healers completely and rework jobs so they have their own way to mitigate damage / heal.
Big brain time

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Originally Posted by Endariel

Here's an idea
Remove healers completely and rework jobs so they have their own way to mitigate damage / heal.
Big brain time

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hmmm, so remove my mains...

yeah, I would have to disagree with that just a little bit.

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

Warhammer Online's Warrior priest is the one that I bring up when this kind of discussion arrises. Using melee attacks to generate charges for it's OGCD/Insta toolkit whilst also having basic but time inefficient heals to fall back onto when needed as well. It'd be something that would be simpler to tune than purely generating healing auras through DPS.

At this point in time I'm honestly fine with SE trying absolutely anything vaguely bold and fresh with healers though. I really don't care what it is. A move towards buffing, debuffing, disc priest style healing auras, utility through dps. I just want SE's devs to try something so I'm not facing another expansion with a nigh 10 to 1 ratio of Glare vs anything else even in Savage content.

The current state of healer gameplay is laughable at best. Can you imagine the uproar if a new DPS job got added that pressed 1 button 200+ times in a Savage encounter with the second place ability coming in at under 30 presses?

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The warrior priest style is the only way I could see it working and not straight breaking the current healers (I was originally hoping this is what the Dancer would have been before it was made a DPS). Though it wouldn't really fit with what the OP wants as you still had to target party and enemies and couldn't just zone straight into just bashing the baddie.

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Originally Posted by Omedon

Could a "fully offensive healer" work in FFXIV?

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Yoshi-P said that healers don't have to dps, and since people were bothering those who didn't want to dps, well, they only have a dot, a monocible spell and an aoe.

Meditated on that.

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Originally Posted by Naoki34

Yoshi-P said that healers don't have to dps, and since people were bothering those who didn't want to dps, well, they only have a dot, a monocible spell and an aoe.

Meditated on that.

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I've always wondered if he always thought so or if he just bent the knee to "healers heal!" crybabies.
It's a strange stance to have when the CNJ quest line and the healer HoN press that dealing damage when healing isn't necessary is important.

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Originally Posted by Naoki34

Yoshi-P said that healers don't have to dps, and since people were bothering those who didn't want to dps, well, they only have a dot, a monocible spell and an aoe.

Meditated on that.

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You realise that he said that whilst releasing content that was impossible to clear without healer DPS right? And no that wasn't just a one off thing with poor tuning in Gordias. Try clearing E8S with both healers not DPSing in that tiers gear.

The content and job design teams are rarely working from the same page it seems, at least as far as healers go.

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Originally Posted by Naoki34

Yoshi-P said that healers don't have to dps, and since people were bothering those who didn't want to dps, well, they only have a dot, a monocible spell and an aoe.

Meditated on that.

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That is heartening to hear. Maybe I'll try the new job with my trusts!

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

You realise that he said that whilst releasing content that was impossible to clear without healer DPS right?

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In the interest of transparency... as a player I absolutely don't go near the "upper end" of any game I play because that's where people put math over enjoyment, so maybe the idea of the upper end of the game not working without healers DPSing is an intentional barrier that I too should observe, should I wish to try the new job.

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Originally Posted by Endariel

Here's an idea
Remove healers completely and rework jobs so they have their own way to mitigate damage / heal.
Big brain time

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Yeah, Gw2 did that and it was awful.

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

Yeah, Gw2 did that and it was awful.

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Seconding this. I for one don't want to see healers go away because I have friends who love healer gameplay in every game they play. FFXIV would not survive a denting of the trinity, it's not the game to attempt this.

Like it or not, DPS is the most popular role for its "lowered responsibilities," and GW2 making everyone "responsible for themselves" was a different take, but one that became... niche.

If anything you'd be better off taking a dps and just giving it wider array of heals. Slap an aoe heal and maybe a regen or shield heal on rdm and wala "offensive healer" lul...

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Originally Posted by Naoki34

Yoshi-P said that healers don't have to dps, and since people were bothering those who didn't want to dps, well, they only have a dot, a monocible spell and an aoe.

Meditated on that.

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Originally Posted by Omedon

That is heartening to hear. Maybe I'll try the new job with my trusts!

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I wouldn't get your hopes up...
He said that all the way back in HW and has since seemed to actively try to avoid talking in depth about healers.

I would love love love something akin to a disc priest. I think it would make a really unique addition to FFXIV, to do passive heals through dps. Idealist me would hope it's something they'd one day look into. I just dunno how it would synergize in a system with patterned incoming damage.

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Originally Posted by Imora

Full on offensive healer would become mandatory, much like disc priests and holy paladins are in WoW.

They're taken because they put out good healing AND damage to beat enrage timers in cutting edge guilds.

I'd rather not see that here.

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To be fair, the concept of an actual green dps would suit WHM rather well, since it's arguably too easy compared to the other 2 and is already the BLM/SAM of healers.

Maybe not that many know or realize that one of the first guys to ever introduce and popularize the concept of "offensive healer" was one mostly dedicated to PvP: https://youtu.be/_HNqnWD1JBs

And yeah it was a way to not only further extent the performance of a healer but also making the role a bit more fun to play, but turning that concept in to PvE, i don't know about it, nor do i know the need to do that, because i don't see people demanding from DPS to also heal.

So if i were to give my opinion, it shouldn't be a healer's role to do dps as a rule, but rather something that you do IF you can, meaning that if people is not making mistakes and they're not eating more damage than they should then that should be rewarded as an opening to put some resources in to dealing dps, maybe a a dot or a few casts once in a while if your team does great, but that's it.

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

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Here's an idea
Remove healers completely and rework jobs so they have their own way to mitigate damage / heal.
Big brain time

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Yeah, Gw2 did that and it was awful.

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The joke is that FFXIV is already in a similar situation since fights are always more focused on one-shot gimmicks and un-removable vulnerability, so "healing" becomes so unimportant that it doesn't really exist anymore. In both games, DPS have to do their own work to stay alive (self-heal in GW2, avoid aoe/do gimmicks in FFXIV)

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Originally Posted by Xathyr

So if i were to give my opinion, it shouldn't be a healer's role to do dps as a rule, but rather something that you do IF you can, meaning that if people is not making mistakes and they're not eating more damage than they should then that should be rewarded as an opening to put some resources in to dealing dps, maybe a a dot or a few casts once in a while if your team does great, but that's it.

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See, I'd love to see this be the communal social compact of modern healing, but, especially in FFXIV, my impression has always been an expectation of DPS on the part of the healer. It's a big reason why all healing gear I loot is vendored and I don't even consider starting a hoard for leveling a healing class/job.

HOWEVER... again, I'm mostly a "trust guy," and I know for a fact that the scions wouldn't sass me for not DPSing as a healer, so it's not impossible that I'll go that route some day, since I can level from literally 1-wherever in Deep dungeons or NPC dungeon parties, and deep dungeons I'd mostly go "DPS unless there's an emergency."

An interesting question about healer/dps hybrids is whether or not to introduce a hybrid tax (lowering output to balance against being able to do both). If a healer role were to be able to do serious dps and heals, it could be more beneficial from a balance point of view.

I've seen games with this meta come out, and the gimmick becomes to down the boss before mechanics can kill the party. By downing the boss a % faster is to deal with a % fewer mechanics, including damage. So dps becomes a mitigation tool, in a sense. Once a game goes down this path, it is hard for any other kind of healing to be relevant, and that is probably why we won't see this kind of healer in FF14.

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Originally Posted by Genz

The joke is that FFXIV is already in a similar situation since fights are always more focused on one-shot gimmicks and un-removable vulnerability, so "healing" becomes so unimportant that it doesn't really exist anymore. In both games, DPS have to do their own work to stay alive (self-heal in GW2, avoid aoe/do gimmicks in FFXIV)

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Was just talking about this to the guild from ESO (this seems to be the general trend among mmos, save a handful). Stems from end of expansion healers being so powerful that the most brain dead priest could carry an entire raid to victory with the good ol' "Stand in fire to DPS higher!"

To curb this, the design has skewed to where healing is only needed for scripted raidwides. One vuln stack means the next mistake is going to kill you, full hp or not, in content where it matters. Using a GCD heal on that person then becomes a waste. In ESO, it has become so bad that you ideally do not want to bring healers to content unless there's specifically a heal check. Even then, Vigor (a class unrestricted stamina heal) is so strong that you only need one or two dps to slot it to beat it half the time. This is even in raids, too.

I know exactly what OP is talking about with a fully offensive healer, and DISC was one of the most punishing, yet rewarding, healers to play in any mmo I've had my grubby hands on. Juggling atonement around your party and only having two actual healing spells (one that is only temporary hp, the other is a shield) is big pressure. When you learned an encounter, though? You felt like a god.

I like the WHM ability Assize. It does damage, it restores mp, and it does a truckload of raid healing. This is a great ability to find use for, but with how little damage there seems to be, and how many lilies I generate between big damage, it usually feels like I'm wasting on overheal somewhere to get that blood lily fed. Perhaps SE can take a look at Assize and think a bit about synergizing healing and damage in a way that compliments their encounter design. They already script fights around 60s CDs, and I'm sure more than a few healers would be thankful for more than spamming one GCD an entire fight.

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

Yeah, Gw2 did that and it was awful.

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Kinda it isn't, in fact is one of the main features of the game and it actually works wonders. There is a reason it has both good PvE and PvP with the same combat. The problems of GW2 are far from it's combat and classes, is more of being unable to achieve "consistency".

The problem with XIV is in fact the lack of customization and hiperfocus on balance and strict adherance to roles. The removal of stuff like elements and statuses, and sticking to the obtuse and since the 70`flawed trinity. There is a fourth role, there is support, and healing and support should be diferent. We need parties of 5s and 10s. We need elements and status back. Etc. Balance has given absolutely nothing to this game. Unlike GW2, we don't even have a decent PvP or PvE/P hibrid experience worth all this resources wasted on making sure everyone uses the same skills in the same order wearing the exact same gear pieces repeating the same gearing process... Yeah, someone get these people mathematical uncertainty. Besides, dances are also getting old.

Who is happy about this ? The Ultimate raiders ? Is it worth the wait and resources ?

I wanna be an evasion off tank self-regen dragoon. Besides Estinien is getting much better instances and main scenario quest than us anyway.

We have them, they're called WHM, AST, SCH, and SGE. Doesn't mean it isn't boring right now (it is), but that's the situation right now.