What's your preferred change?

1. Give healers more damage abilities, e.g. 1 or 2 oGCDs for a slightly better rotation.
2. More consistent and bigger raid damage so healers spend most of the time healing.
3. Both?
4. Anything that makes the job busier.

All of the above.

Well I did think of option 3. lol

5. None of the above. Make them fun to play.

This is done by rewarding the healer by playing the job as intended, and that is done through interactive gameplay in order to acquire the resources to use rewarding skills.

This is why simply giving me more DPS skills to press, or the game pumping out more raid damage won't do a whole lot to change the state of healing. I want those DPS skills to be given to me as a reward so it feels better to press them, and makes it more evident to me when I am doing things wrong because they are not available. I also shouldn't have to wait until I'm near max level for me to enjoy that gameplay so I can still have fun playing my job in synced content.

While we can't look at anything as set in stone right now, from the abilities trailer it really looks like AST is the healer that fulfills this the most. I saw the AST using their card mechanic to gain the seals in order to cast a really cool meteorain. If that is the case, then that is exactly what I'm talking about.

Passive Lilies; a useless Fey Gauge. Changes to these tools and resources is what I want changed. It's the key to creating a solid roster of healers for FFXIV, and that is what I feel this team really needs to focus on.

6. Give healers more versatile and expressive glamour options (especially with body pieces).

I don't think options [1] or [2] would be nearly sufficient. Nor would [3] necessarily be any better. [4] seems like it'd have less that could go wrong, per se, short of intentionally malicious compliance (adding bloat or convolution just for the sake of added apm).

I think the larger part is that a far, far larger of our actions as healers need to feel eventful in the context of a given fight. A small part of that could be from CDs saved or resources prepared for a certain mechanic that'd otherwise be lethal if that actually amounts to you feeling like your extra GCDs used for healing in order to save those CDs or ready those later spenders are rewarding a real and deliberate decision, rather than merely following procedures to keep safe margins.

Offense, too, should have costs and reward. We saw this somewhat when casters had more DoTs. Since there were particular moments you wanted to keep free for their refreshes in order to optimize their average potency-per-minute, the relative costs of a heal in any particular moment would wax and wane not only with future events or chances of danger, but also with your own rotation. Being able to track and meet the ends of both internal and external circumstances, then, offered a higher skill-ceiling and greater rewards, all without actually forcing less skilled healers out of a role.

Synergies, too, can spice things up. Sometimes these are the obvious synergies of an unique mode of X and a unique capacity Y that inadvertantly suits it, such as in that a SCH needed more time to ready a Bane but Galvanize would allow them that time. Other times, such as in early ARR, it could be more compositional, such as WHM being capable of a hard CC and SCH capable of a mass-Heavy and BLM, around whom the dungeon party-wide strategies of stacked AoE or focused burns most shifted (at least until Flare, later gear creep, and speedrun comp dominance). There, too, though, your kit and your actions had connective impact. You didn't merely fill bars via oGCD heals; they allowed for something more, and that something more had its own implications in turn.

That, I feel, is what we need to go back to and beyond. Obviously, we've still relatively few good examples of contextually stellar healer design even when going back to the "good old days" of GCD heals, CC, cross-role versatility, or the like having an integral place, but we've at least gotten hints enough to mark a direction. I hope we don't wait until it's too late to take up that tack and go for it.

How option 2 is supposed to work? They redesign and test every group encounter in the game, which for an 8 year old game is A LOT; or encounter design gonna change starting from some patch and you're still gonna have no healing in all old content?

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Originally Posted by BooPoo

1. Give healers more damage abilities, e.g. 1 or 2 oGCDs for a slightly better rotation.
2. More consistent and bigger raid damage so healers spend most of the time healing.
3. Both?
4. Anything that makes the job busier.

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With 5.0 the SCH lost it's identity. It was a dot-tossing healer...and that was way better than the trash they stuck us with now. I'm so sick of spamming BROIL!

1. Give healers more damage abilities, e.g. 1 or 2 oGCDs for a slightly better rotation.
4. Anything that makes the job busier.[/QUOTE]

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Originally Posted by AikenDrum

How option 2 is supposed to work? They redesign and test every group encounter in the game, which for an 8 year old game is A LOT; or encounter design gonna change starting from some patch and you're still gonna have no healing in all old content?

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Tbh I don't really know and I hope they don't go with that approach at all. Being a hybrid healer/DPS makes healing in this game infinitely more fun for me compared to other MMOs. I only put it down because I did see a few players wanting healers in FFXIV to be "pure pure healers".

Do you think there is a chance SE removes healer DPS and change healers to align with e.g. WoW instead in the future?

For starters, I want the design to reflect how the game is actually played. To make a long story short there will ALWAYS be significant downtime where you're DPSing unless they fundamentally redesign combat in this game from the ground up. Straight up, with the ways encounter, gearing, and stats are designed there is no way around this. So embrace it, realize that DPS is as much a part of our play as it is for tanks and make combat more interesting.

Now, beyond that I'd also say give us more ways to contribute, and ideally I'd wrap the two together. Sage is actually a step in the right direction with DPS spells providing passive healing, but ideally I'd go with something similar: Allow our DPS during downtime to contribute meaningfully to our support role. It could be something simple like DPS actions contributing to fairy gauge or lilies, or something a bit more complicated like having combos for our spells with the finisher granting a party-wide buff.

Recognize that we'll spend a fair amount of our time DPSing especially as player skill and gear rises, but wrap that into the core support mentality.

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Originally Posted by Urthdigger

For starters, I want the design to reflect how the game is actually played. To make a long story short there will ALWAYS be significant downtime where you're DPSing unless they fundamentally redesign combat in this game from the ground up. Straight up, with the ways encounter, gearing, and stats are designed there is no way around this. So embrace it, realize that DPS is as much a part of our play as it is for tanks and make combat more interesting.

Now, beyond that I'd also say give us more ways to contribute, and ideally I'd wrap the two together. Sage is actually a step in the right direction with DPS spells providing passive healing, but ideally I'd go with something similar: Allow our DPS during downtime to contribute meaningfully to our support role. It could be something simple like DPS actions contributing to fairy gauge or lilies, or something a bit more complicated like having combos for our spells with the finisher granting a party-wide buff.

Recognize that we'll spend a fair amount of our time DPSing especially as player skill and gear rises, but wrap that into the core support mentality.

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I also have something in mind for the players who religiously hate DPSing as a healer. We can go further with the buff system AST currently has, and have a few healer whos damage contrib came from themselves (Sage etc.) and a few others that don't do complex damage rotation but buff teammates significantly.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-healer-issues

^ this first post (regularly updated) summaries almost everything.

Change the devs mindset from pure healer to healer/support.

I enjoy playing as a green DPS, which the game currently incentivizes, so I wish that I had more attack variety for a majority of the fights. Limiting attack options doesn't alone translate to the player attacking less; it just means their attacking will become way more repetitive and boring. Even if they raise healing requirements for the next expansion's contents, that still won't retroactively fix the first 80 levels of still actively played content.

My preferred change is pretty simple, honestly.

Medica II learned between level 47 and 49 instead of at 50. Benediction can stay 50, I'm fine with that. But really - Medica II between 47 and 49 for when I sync. That's all I ask.

1 or 2 additional DPS spells would be nice, but no more
Please make more Tumult mechanics. Clutch healing feels so good

Remove all there dps skills in dungeons so they can focus on healing. Reason keep seeing healers only doing dps and not healing anyone.

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Originally Posted by hynaku

Remove all there dps skills in dungeons so they can focus on healing. Reason keep seeing healers only doing dps and not healing anyone.

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I believe it's possible to make healers engaging without having any dps skills, though I doubt it fit the environment of FFXIV or the philosophy of current healer design.

When I was playing Ragnarok online 11 years ago, the only healer in the game was Priest. There was a spec called Miracle Priest and it was my main. It was so engaging whenever I was in a party despite not having any offensive spells ( they added 1 offensive spell for leveling 1 year later) . All Miracle priest did back then were healing and buffing. The reason it was engaging is because there were lots of buffs that work in various timers. You have party buffs that boost crit chance for 30 seconds, mitigation for 15s, mp regen for 10s. You also needs to reapply various single target buffs when you're not healing. Speed boost only lasts 60 seconds. Stats boost for 30 seconds. Attack boost for 15s. Enchantment for 15s. Shields for 10s. An optimized Miracle priest had to maintain both party buffs and personal buffs while healing. It was a lot of stress, but in the meantime, very satisfying and engaging to play.

My choice is '3', both.

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Originally Posted by hynaku

Remove all there dps skills in dungeons so they can focus on healing. Reason keep seeing healers only doing dps and not healing anyone.

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We could also reduce the DPS rotation of DPS jobs to simple 1, 2, 3 rotations to alleviate the pressure and focus from maximising their DPS in their rotation to focus on mechanics and similar, do it with tanks. I'd end up carrying fewer groups as a healer that way and more runs could go more smoothly. But this would be dull and remove a level of challenge/difficulty.

I don't think making the role even less engaging than it is now is the right answer. Your healers then end up twiddling their thumbs 70% of the time, except they probably won't because they'll find other ways of being occupied such as playing with their phone, goofing off etc.
Then you'll also find people getting more and more frustrated in DPS checks and enrage mechanics, because when you get those 3% wipes? Your healer is going to be standing there saying "there were these times I was doing nothing at all, I'd have helped if I could".

I think there are more productive ways of mitigating this problem. Making their down time less monotonous is one way because they won't have to tunnel vision, the most times I've ever said "woops, I forgot I was a healer" was in ShB. What they've done with Sage is another.

I'd just like a full dps rotation as healer. They should just make it proc based. Base heal or damage procs second level boost. If boost is active second level damage spell or heal procs third level. Third level procs a bonus to first level. So you have a dps/healing rotation which don't interrupt each other but just moves to the next part of the rotation and you can choose to dps or heal.

Like as example stone or cure would proc say empowered which makes stone 2 do 100 more pot or could be used on cure 2 for 200 more pot heal. Stone 2 and cure 2 if used under empowered proc would proc in tuned which makes stone 3 hit harder or cure 3 heal more. So you could cure>stone 2> cure 3 and get procs. Or. Stone> cure 2> stone 3 and still be working the rotation as intented.

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Originally Posted by Urthdigger

It could be something simple like DPS actions contributing to fairy gauge or lilies, or something a bit more complicated like having combos for our spells with the finisher granting a party-wide buff.

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While not tied to dps, SCH had a freecure with sacred soil, and in SB "quickened aetherflow". they got rid of that because "reasons" ?
I think all that's left is freecure and enhanced benefic.

I'd go with 4 or 5 ; make it busier and most importantly fun.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

This is done by rewarding the healer by playing the job as intended, and that is done through interactive gameplay in order to acquire the resources to use rewarding skills.

This is why simply giving me more DPS skills to press, or the game pumping out more raid damage won't do a whole lot to change the state of healing. I want those DPS skills to be given to me as a reward so it feels better to press them, and makes it more evident to me when I am doing things wrong because they are not available.

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In this situation, would you consider Afflatus Misery a reward? When you say passive lilies you want them to slowly bloom over time with or without doing anything? or did you have something else in mind?

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Originally Posted by hynaku

Remove all there dps skills in dungeons so they can focus on healing. Reason keep seeing healers only doing dps and not healing anyone.

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This just wouldn't work at the level cap in expert dungeons as things are. I'm sorry, but you simply do not understand how this game plays at a vaguely competent level if you genuinely think this is a viable option that isn't basically just you believing that healers are purely there to simp for you whilst you play the 'hero'.

Here's why:

In the first Paglthan log I have to hand on WHM, I cast 32 healing GCDs (14 of which were mid pull regens) and 18 healing oGCDs. That's over a 13:08 run. That works out to a button press every 24 seconds.

My CPM in that run was a little over 22, your suggestion would drop it down to a little over 2. Time to load up Netflix. Feel free to /yell and <se> spam if you need a heal, I'll be watching the second screen :rolleyes:

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

This just wouldn't work at the level cap in expert dungeons as things are. I'm sorry, but you simply do not understand how this game plays at a vaguely competent level if you genuinely think this is a viable option that isn't basically just you believing that healers are purely there to simp for you whilst you play the 'hero'.

Here's why:

In the first Paglthan log I have to hand on WHM, I cast 32 healing GCDs (14 of which were mid pull regens) and 18 healing oGCDs. That's over a 13:08 run. That works out to a button press every 24 seconds.

My CPM in that run was a little over 22, your suggestion would drop it down to a little over 2. Time to load up Netflix. Feel free to /yell and <se> spam if you need a heal, I'll be watching the second screen :rolleyes:

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Your healing to much, tell the tank to pop their invul more often. I believe in you, you can get it under 1 CPM.

Ok jokes aside. SCH could literally afk follow tanks or dps in the lower dungeons and just have fairy do all the healing. This lack of a need for consistent healing is why healers forget to heal sometimes.

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Originally Posted by Bsrking5

Ok jokes aside. SCH could literally afk follow tanks or dps in the lower dungeons and just have fairy do all the healing. This lack of a need for consistent healing is why healers forget to heal sometimes.

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It's not just the lack of healing, it's also how boring it is to spam 1 button. When 70% of your gameplay consists of spamming the same button you start to zone out, it literally becomes so boring that you can't focus on the game which then leads to people forgetting to heal when they actually need to for once.


I've even had that happen on warrior. Farming a savage fight that I've done like 30 times (only counting the pulls that were actually kills), with warrior's less than stimulating rotation, made me zone out and simply forget the mechanic timeline, getting me thrown off the platform.

And warrior still has significantly more going on than healer gameplay most of the time.

Oh I know a healing/tank change I want. Getting a person in the job team that plays tank and healer, so we don’t have 3 damage dealer player that have no clue how to design fun and challenging healer and tank kits. At some point you would think they bolster the ranks for how successful the game is.

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Originally Posted by BooPoo

1. Give healers more damage abilities, e.g. 1 or 2 oGCDs for a slightly better rotation.
2. More consistent and bigger raid damage so healers spend most of the time healing.
3. Both?
4. Anything that makes the job busier.

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3,
+ more team buff skill for heal
+ revert back to the time we have to use Repose/Esuna and have to manage our MP

@OP: agreed on all but the first point, since if healers are made busier--class resource management (lookin at you fairy guage, who as of the 6.0 sizzle reel has only a single skill using it in all of SCHs kit), meaningful party buffs or enemy debuffs, higher incoming damage/healing requirements--the lack of offensive options would theoretically be fine remaining vestigial, since it'd be the lowest on the list of priorities, and hopefully those more important ones wuld take up the large majority of time.

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Originally Posted by SpiralMask

@OP: agreed on all but the first point, since if healers are made busier--class resource management (lookin at you fairy guage, who as of the 6.0 sizzle reel has only a single skill using it in all of SCHs kit), meaningful party buffs or enemy debuffs, higher incoming damage/healing requirements--the lack of offensive options would theoretically be fine remaining vestigial, since it'd be the lowest on the list of priorities, and hopefully those more important ones wuld take up the large majority of time.

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What you said is true but I do not agree that it's a good direction. I think healers existing ONLY for filling HP bars and buffing teammates in instances is terrible design for an MMORPG. Giving healers more varied and rewarding offensive options makes it feel way better to optimize healing. The "reward" for being a good healer should be helping the team deal more damage (either through more pdps or buff/debuffs) and not just keeping the team alive like a slave. This is also where heterogeneity can help. We can have selfish healers like Sage and buff healers like AST.

Also, give it a thought about open world. This is an MMO with a beautiful world to discover, I doubt a lot of the players want to be useless on their own spamming 111111 for a fraction of other players' damage.

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Originally Posted by BooPoo

What you said is true but I do not agree that it's a good direction. I think healers existing ONLY for filling HP bars and buffing teammates in instances is terrible design for an MMORPG. Giving healers more varied and rewarding offensive options makes it feel way better to optimize healing. The "reward" for being a good healer should be helping the team deal more damage (either through more pdps or buff/debuffs) and not just keeping the team alive like a slave. This is also where heterogeneity can help. We can have selfish healers like Sage and buff healers like AST.

Also, give it a thought about open world. This is an MMO with a beautiful world to discover, I doubt a lot of the players want to be useless on their own spamming 111111 for a fraction of other players' damage.

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increased healing requirements was only one of the angles they could decrease downtime (and therefore need for dps variance) with, but i get what you mean. it's certainly not very fun or interesting when doing anyhting solo as a healer with a gimped dps kit yeah (scholar used to be fun because of just that reason, even)

Personally, I miss all the old support tools we used to have; Virus, Disable, Eye for an Eye, the Slow of Shadowflare, the Knockback of Fluid Aura, AST's old cards.
There was a lot of potential in evolving healers to provide unique buffs from one another but they instead decided to just give them the same basic toolkit with a different shade of color from one another and call it a day.

Since they decided to leave only purely mitigation tools for healers and lowered their DPS rotation to a single button, Healers have become needlessly dull. I just want more to do

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Originally Posted by Silver-Strider

Personally, I miss all the old support tools we used to have; Virus, Disable, Eye for an Eye, the Slow of Shadowflare, the Knockback of Fluid Aura, AST's old cards.
There was a lot of potential in evolving healers to provide unique buffs from one another but they instead decided to just give them the same basic toolkit with a different shade of color from one another and call it a day.

Since they decided to leave only purely mitigation tools for healers and lowered their DPS rotation to a single button, Healers have become needlessly dull. I just want more to do

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It's a shame that Virus and Disable were cut in order to give utility to DPS classes. I'm not against DPS having utility, but it's not like it made healing harder having damage mitigation debuffs. Shadowflare getting cut at all was yet another thing Scholars received that they never asked for. You lost me at the knockback though. Bosses were immune to it and it could actually disrupt your melee allies in situations where you could knockback an enemy. I'd prefer keeping Heavy in some fashion for mechanics like the adds in A3S since that serves a similar purpose without ejecting enemies from your party's range.

As for the AST cards, I do think they needed a change, but the overly sterile cards of ShB really wasn't the right answer.

I'm excited for a number of the changes and new content but one thing Id very much like more info on is housing. I'm aware the there will be separate plots for FCs and individual housing. A roulette system meant to make camping a plot obsolete, and first come first serve housing available for purchase at the beginning. What I'm NOT clear on is a number of things; How will relocations be handled in this system? Someone who has a home and wishes to relo into one of the new plots. Will they have preferential treatment to bypass the roulette timers? The relocation timers seems so fast, allowing trolls and players to jump in and out of plots, resetting timers and causing a lot of otherwise patient people to lose their cool. Maybe extending the cooldown time between relocations to a full 24 hours? Make people more conscious of their choices when they move. Will this new system be just for the new location or will it be across all wards in all districts? When inserting your money deposit for a house in the roulette system, will you immediately receive your money if the house sells to another player? Will you receive it in the mail as an item since mail only allows for 1 mil a message? I'm merely asking for clarifications because I've heard so many rumors. I know the actual housing isn't opening up til 6.1, several months after the release of Endwalker. But something official to whet out metaphorical teeth on. or at least someone we can ask?

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Originally Posted by TBMatthews

I'm excited for a number of the changes and new content but one thing Id very much like more info on is housing. I'm aware the there will be separate plots for FCs and individual housing. A roulette system meant to make camping a plot obsolete, and first come first serve housing available for purchase at the beginning. What I'm NOT clear on is a number of things; How will relocations be handled in this system? Someone who has a home and wishes to relo into one of the new plots. Will they have preferential treatment to bypass the roulette timers? The relocation timers seems so fast, allowing trolls and players to jump in and out of plots, resetting timers and causing a lot of otherwise patient people to lose their cool. Maybe extending the cooldown time between relocations to a full 24 hours? Make people more conscious of their choices when they move. Will this new system be just for the new location or will it be across all wards in all districts? When inserting your money deposit for a house in the roulette system, will you immediately receive your money if the house sells to another player? Will you receive it in the mail as an item since mail only allows for 1 mil a message? I'm merely asking for clarifications because I've heard so many rumors. I know the actual housing isn't opening up til 6.1, several months after the release of Endwalker. But something official to whet out metaphorical teeth on. or at least someone we can ask?

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Sir, this is the healer forum.

I've had two years to come to terms with AST's card sterilization and didn't expect that to change at all, so seeing Minor Arcana's upcoming version bring back a form of RNG that matters feels better has been a legitimate, genuine and very pleasant surprise.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

It's a shame that Virus and Disable were cut in order to give utility to DPS classes. I'm not against DPS having utility, but it's not like it made healing harder having damage mitigation debuffs. Shadowflare getting cut at all was yet another thing Scholars received that they never asked for. You lost me at the knockback though. Bosses were immune to it and it could actually disrupt your melee allies in situations where you could knockback an enemy. I'd prefer keeping Heavy in some fashion for mechanics like the adds in A3S since that serves a similar purpose without ejecting enemies from your party's range.

As for the AST cards, I do think they needed a change, but the overly sterile cards of ShB really wasn't the right answer.

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The Knockback had its purpose though. I still remember the days of t9 where you could yeet Golems around to collect meteors. Also, that 1 mage add in Paglth'an right at the beginning of the dungeon is just begging for it.

There was a fake leaker a while back that said WHM was getting a Water → Water2 → Banish that sounded like it was supposed to be an OGCD attack. I'm actually kind of fond of it as a concept, as I like the idea of playing into the Land-Sea-Sky nature of the early druid-style theming, and having another OGCD attack to weave in more often when I don't have any heals that need to go out would be nice.