What are alternative healing options you want to see on a new healer class?

So there's 2 pure healers and 2 barrier healers but if they release a 5th healer then where would that fit into and what are some ideas for new skills?

With current healer design, who wants or needs a fifth healer?
You must be trolling.

I was just trying to start a conversation, I'm not trolling at all

Maybe some people want a 5th healer, it's a pretty big player base. The game doesn't need a 5th healer, but nothing is stopping them from making another one.

A healer that's created by that healer tester who they kicked out of the team.

What happened? What did they do so wrong that they got kicked?

They got good

(I'm not even kidding)

Back on topic. A melee healer, something akin to Warrior Priest in Warhammer Online will always be my instant answer. I had hoped Dancer would be FFXIV's answer to this but it wasn't meant to be =(

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Originally Posted by krislox

I was just trying to start a conversation, I'm not trolling at all

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Don't mind the salt of the forums. Back when we only had 3 and people wanted a fourth, a lot of forum trolls were saying the same thing - "We already have 3! How could a fourth possibly fit in? We should never ever have new content for healers, everything that could possibly be done with healing has been done" etc etc.

Personally, I just hope it doesn't take 6+ years for new content again.

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Originally Posted by IDontPetLalas

With current healer design, who wants or needs a fifth healer?
You must be trolling.

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There will be comedy value in watching the hype for yet another healer when it will just inevitably turn out to be another carbon copy?

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Originally Posted by krislox

What happened? What did they do so wrong that they got kicked?

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The healer tester was kicked out for being "too good" when literally all they did was start looking at normal/alliance raids on healer and the odd extreme. You know, content that any healer will do after completing the dungeons which is the lowest level of difficulty. The healer tester was not even a healer main to "simulate casual and new player's experience of a dungeon"

Meanwhile, yoshida himself was in the test team, a black mage who is at a high enough level to do ultimates, testing on the job he's best at. In the same team.


As for your original question, they absolutely bloody could make a 5th healer. In cased you missed the memo, the "regen/barrier split" is nonexistant. All healers have regens and shields and content is not designed for either given how little of it actually requires healers so not only does it fail its purpose but the healer role is redundant currently.

If they put some effort into healers we'd have 4 unique healers and still have room for a 5th instead of 1 with a few tweaks and called separate jobs. And we'd have damage that requires us to be present in all content

I'd rather SE actually put work in to making the existing 4 healers have identities instead of having 2 carbon copies of the first 2 they created before they make another healer.

AST could be a full regen healer. Why isn't it?

SGE was "advertised" as the healer who did damage so why isn't it the healer that heals by doing damage?

No. I don't want a 5th healer to steal ideas like SGE stole Noct sect until that's addressed or is slated to be addressed.

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Originally Posted by krislox

What happened? What did they do so wrong that they got kicked?

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Apologies for the half-troll and half-joke from my side. Sebazy & Recon answered it for you.

Now jokes aside... I'd love to see a healer:

• That are not magical by nature.
• Healers that heals by marking/cursing their target so that players who attack them leeches off HP to recover.
• A healer that's not just all about white, light, and pretty sparkles.

Or the good ol' response: I'd rather them improve what we already have because when managing 3 healers was already disastrous, I don't think I want to trust them with 2 extra.

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Originally Posted by ASkellington

I'd rather SE actually put work in to making the existing 4 healers have identities instead of having 2 carbon copies of the first 2 they created before they make another healer.

AST could be a full regen healer. Why isn't it?

SGE was "advertised" as the healer who did damage so why isn't it the healer that heals by doing damage?

No. I don't want a 5th healer to steal ideas like SGE stole Noct sect until that's addressed or is slated to be addressed.

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sge stealing noct sect wouldve been an improvement beause we would still have a noct sect playstyle (ogcd shield focused)
instead we got scholar.......... 2!

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Originally Posted by ASkellington

I'd rather SE actually put work in to making the existing 4 healers have identities instead of having 2 carbon copies of the first 2 they created before they make another healer.

AST could be a full regen healer. Why isn't it?

SGE was "advertised" as the healer who did damage so why isn't it the healer that heals by doing damage?

No. I don't want a 5th healer to steal ideas like SGE stole Noct sect until that's addressed or is slated to be addressed.

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Sadly, if normal content/roulettes are anything to go by, the average player has no idea what a regen even is, nor would they have the patience/confidence to rely on it. Though I do agree that would help AST differenciate more from WHM's almost completely burst heal kit.

I'm also cautiously optimistic *inhales copium* that because SGE is testing new waters, they wanted to see how it'd be received first, and by 7.0 the whole damage-to-heal will be expanded upon. I will officially quit if they just add more heals on top and call it a day.

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Originally Posted by Allegor

Sadly, if normal content/roulettes are anything to go by, the average player has no idea what a regen even is, nor would they have the patience/confidence to rely on it. Though I do agree that would help AST differenciate more from WHM's almost completely burst heal kit.

I'm also cautiously optimistic *inhales copium* that because SGE is testing new waters, they wanted to see how it'd be received first, and by 7.0 the whole damage-to-heal will be expanded upon. I will officially quit if they just add more heals on top and call it a day.

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I got some copium for you.

Scholar rework 7.0.

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Originally Posted by Allegor

I'm also cautiously optimistic *inhales copium* that because SGE is testing new waters, they wanted to see how it'd be received first, and by 7.0 the whole damage-to-heal will be expanded upon. I will officially quit if they just add more heals on top and call it a day.

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Damage to heal is a terrible idea, that makes healer essentially pointless. And Kardia is just a phat regen promoting you to spam one skill while the other 3 don’t have to

I'd like to start instead by going back to the existing 4 healers and actually fleshing them out.

Frankly, we shouldn't even be discussing Time Mage as a DPS, for instance; that should be Astrologian already, as it was at its start. Double-down on the time-space theme.

Heck, double-down on and reinvigorate every initial theme of every healer. Some, like Conjury, may need to evolve over the job's levels (such as to better accommodate turning into purely generic light-flashes --err, White Magic), but that's okay so long as it doesn't strip the job of the depth it'd manage through those reinvigorated forms of past themes.

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Originally Posted by Jirah

Damage to heal is a terrible idea, that makes healer essentially pointless. And Kardia is just a phat regen promoting you to spam one skill while the other 3 don’t have to

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None of this makes sense.

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Originally Posted by Jirah

Damage to heal is a terrible idea, that makes healer essentially pointless. And Kardia is just a phat regen promoting you to spam one skill while the other 3 don’t have to

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Originally Posted by rewd

None of this makes sense.

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Kardia is literally just a set heal tick value, effectively per GCD, which then punishes you further for using any healing GCDs. It leads to, apart from the sole exception of Eukrasian Diagnosis, an even higher cost to using healing GCDs than any of the other three healers.

And, yes, locking healing behind damage (or otherwise making direct healing even less worthwhile) rarely produces good results, design wise. Since it's already a part of Sage, though, it might as well be expanded upon on that particular job, ideally by having Kardia instead scale with damage (or offensive potency) dealt and opening up its dps kit such that Kardia then becomes capable of banking and burst(ier) healing.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

I'd like to start instead by going back to the existing 4 healers and actually fleshing them out.

Frankly, we shouldn't even be discussing Time Mage as a DPS, for instance; that should be Astrologian already, as it was at its start. Double-down on the time-space theme.

Heck, double-down on and reinvigorate every initial theme of every healer. Some, like Conjury, may need to evolve over the job's levels (such as to better accommodate turning into purely generic light-flashes --err, White Magic), but that's okay so long as it doesn't strip the job of the depth it'd manage through those reinvigorated forms of past themes.

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i miss time magic sooo much from ast. almost more than the old cards themselves. nothing was more satisfying than extending a bunch of regens along with lucid and lightspeed... i despise the new celestial oppositon.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Kardia is literally just a set heal tick value, effectively per GCD, which then punishes you further for using any healing GCDs. It leads to, apart from the sole exception of Eukrasian Diagnosis, an even higher cost to using healing GCDs than any of the other three healers.

And, yes, locking healing behind damage (or otherwise making direct healing even less worthwhile) rarely produces good results, design wise. Since it's already a part of Sage, though, it might as well be expanded upon on that particular job, ideally by having Kardia instead scale with damage (or offensive potency) dealt and opening up its dps kit such that Kardia then becomes capable of banking and burst(ier) healing.

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The way Kardia is implemented is meh, I give you that. It's a set small potency, doesn't stack per target hit, and there isn't even an aoe variant - it's basically just a less effective and more restricted Eos, but that doesn't mean the concept of healing through dealing damage is bad. If anything, the playstyle is meant so you wouldn't ever need to gcd heal, since you're literally already "gcd healing" by attacking.

Other games have effectively achieved this playstyle too so it's not some brand new idea only XIV came up with either. It would do well if the devs look at their competition and take a few notes, but that'd require them to actually care for the healing role to begin with.

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Originally Posted by Allegor

The way Kardia is implemented is meh, I give you that. It's a set small potency, doesn't stack per target hit, and there isn't even an aoe variant - it's basically just a less effective and more restricted Eos, but that doesn't mean the concept of healing through dealing damage is bad. If anything, the playstyle is meant so you wouldn't ever need to gcd heal, since you're literally already "gcd healing" by attacking.

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Oh, I'm not judging the concept off of Kardia, alone, of all things. I'm judging it off of what I've seen in that vein from:

• Aion
• EQ2
• Ragnorak Online
• Rift
• WoW
• and probably a couple others that are slipping out of memory for the moment.

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If anything, the playstyle is meant so you wouldn't ever need to gcd heal, since you're literally already "gcd healing" by attacking.

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And THAT is actually the biggest problem.

The tuning for healers is essentially a combination of long-term contribution (which is only ever damage in this game) and short-term [spikes of] contribution (enough mitigation/healing not to have anyone die and thus lose damage to downtime and Weakness).

So what happens when you have a healer that always does damage and always does healing?

Simply put, the swing between outputs (curative and offensive) available to said healer becomes painfully minimal, making them far less flexible (and, in many cases, less engaging) than more traditional healers (if just not done so poorly as, say, XIV's).

Need more healing? Your damage is already maxed out, so your healing is too. Need more damage? Your healing is already maxed out, so your damage is too. The most you'd have available is to, say, pop a banked haste buff and just hope your damage will be sufficient to keep everyone alive.

It therefore tends towards both the inflexible and quickly stale.

It's not whether a damage-based healer CAN keep up or not that makes it a bad design. It's that it's a kit designed to have minimal opportunity to change its throughput (profile).

(Though yes, the fact that you'd often have to hold onto damage CDs for healing checks, making such jobs either undertuned when you do or overtuned in fights in which you need not, thus effectively barring them from prog and/or obliging their presence in farm is also a problem.

While I seriously doubt SE's competency to do it at all, let alone well, an actually HoT focused Healer would be nice imho.

While all Healers currently have a Regen effect or two, ime, they all usually jsut use their various direct heal oGCDs first, with regens just to let people tick up to full.

What I'm more looking for would be a Healer that stacks various HoTs on people somewhat proactively instead of just pressing big heal x or y after damage. Ideally they'd have emergency tools that took the HoTs and maybe applied them immediatly at a certain %tage for emergency Heals. Then again, this is FFXIV, and we can't have Healing kits where spells inter act with each other beyond 'press this cd to heal more'

A concept i came up with:

A barrier healer which uses MP directly as the barrier. Abilities generaly focus on restoring MP to enable more healing. Has 2 basic offensive abilities: a slow cast without MP cost, and an instant cast that costs MP. And one amplified DPS ability that does cost quite a bit of MP, but does require team members to have higher HP as the damage is decided by team health (this is ment as a DPS increase on teams that barely take damage). As the MP is used as shield itself, most abilities are on a GCD, including additional healing capabilities outside of using MP (panic heals). Some abilities allow you to mark a DPS which through damage can also recharge your MP. Some traits would be better conversion rates for MP. And getting additional marks on the DPS classes to get even more MP from them. Later on as trait, when out of MP, damage does still get mitigated, but at a reduced value (to allow the player to drain the MP more reliably to get more damage).

Basicly using MP in a completely diffirent method compared to other healers, while in its basics is still being played quite similar to a scholar (until beyond a certain level your trait behaviour starts to truly take over).

This is an important topic to people not currently playing a healer as well. I would love to main a healer for an expansion or two for variety, but none of the current archetypes really click for me personally.

I think part of the problem is that FFXIV's healer design never really got over ARR's WHM/SCH dichotomy and tries to compartmentalize healers into these pre-existing categories, rather than breaking the mold and creating more diverse playstyles. Why do healers have to be casters? I've seen games with melee range, aura-based healers before. When people were speculating on DNC's release during the lead in to Shadowbringers, that was my expectation on where they would take the job. Start up a dance step, and then launch into melee combos and oGCDs that proc dance effects on nearby allies.

Likewise, there was an interview leading in to Endwalker where Yoshi-p stated that the initial design for SGE was similar to the FFT Chemist concept that players suggested (i.e. to carry a medicine box and throw different potions.) The main issue with a non-magical healer like Chemist is how you do resource management. But that's quite naturally resolved using an ammo/reload system where the potential downtime from reloading forces you to make decisions on how to allocate your resources. And the Mix mechanic could very easily have been executed by combining ground effects from two potions. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the idea makes its way over to Physical Ranged instead. It's as if anything that involves the slightest bit of experimentation or risk finds its way on to DPS instead, which is why the role has a lot more variety and fun.

I probably wouldn't main a caster healer no matter how exciting the rotation, but I would 100% be willing to try out a melee-range aura healer or a Chemist/Ana style sniper healer with healing grenades. Perhaps even something with a edgier theme like using vampiric lifesteal to heal your allies (oh wait, that's WAR).

I loved playing a Chanter in Aion. It would be cool if we had a healer a bit like that, they had very nice melee combos and supportive spells.

Regen healer?

When I throw regents up so me and the other healer in the party can dps they don’t they just totally waste my regen and heal all the hp back.

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Originally Posted by RayneBoemir

Regen healer?

When I throw regents up so me and the other healer in the party can dps they don’t they just totally waste my regen and heal all the hp back.

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Hey man if they wanna waste mana, let them.

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Originally Posted by Allegor

The way Kardia is implemented is meh, I give you that. It's a set small potency, doesn't stack per target hit, and there isn't even an aoe variant - it's basically just a less effective and more restricted Eos

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Saying that Kardia is less effective and more restrictive than Eos is debatable, if we compare it to Embrace (because you really can't compare it to Eos' full kit) I'd argue that Kardia comes out on top, atleast with how healers are currently played. Now if healing involved GCDs all the time it would be a different story.


-Kardia is 170 potency and while Embrace should in theory be 180 potency your pet doesn't gain 100% of your stats but only 89%, so in reality Embrace heals for less than it should.
-While Kardia does absolutely nothing if you're casting healing GCDs you also don't lose access to it just because you used Dissipation and it can be targeted, unlike Embrace, so you remain full control over who gets your heal.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

So what happens when you have a healer that always does damage and always does healing?

Simply put, the swing between outputs (curative and offensive) available to said healer becomes painfully minimal, making them far less flexible (and, in many cases, less engaging) than more traditional healers (if just not done so poorly as, say, XIV's).

Need more healing? Your damage is already maxed out, so your healing is too. Need more damage? Your healing is already maxed out, so your damage is too. The most you'd have available is to, say, pop a banked haste buff and just hope your damage will be sufficient to keep everyone alive.

It therefore tends towards both the inflexible and quickly stale.

It's not whether a damage-based healer CAN keep up or not that makes it a bad design. It's that it's a kit designed to have minimal opportunity to change its throughput (profile).

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a damage-based healer doesnt mean that damage translates into healing all the time, or even in the same way for every single spell. it doesnt have to be a 1:1 translation of damage done to healing done. any design problem can be fixed with enough creativity.

just off the top of my head, having more skills like zoe that purely increase healing would affect the healing output without caring for the damage output. having more variation of kardia healing effects would also help (like if e.dosis gave a shield like in pvp, if phlegma gave a regen, if toxicon did aoe healing, etc). the basis for making sage lean more into "healing with damage spells" is there, and it could work if they doubled down more on that aspect instead of copying scholar's homework.

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Originally Posted by QooEr

a damage-based healer doesnt mean that damage translates into healing all the time, or even in the same way for every single spell. it doesnt have to be a 1:1 translation of damage done to healing done. any design problem can be fixed with enough creativity.

just off the top of my head, having more skills like zoe that purely increase healing would affect the healing output without caring for the damage output. having more variation of kardia healing effects would also help (like if e.dosis gave a shield like in pvp, if phlegma gave a regen, if toxicon did aoe healing, etc). the basis for making sage lean more into "healing with damage spells" is there, and it could work if they doubled down more on that aspect instead of copying scholar's homework.

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What could also work is something like changing Physis 2 from simply applying a regen to instead spreading your Kardia to everyone in your party for X seconds.

This would also mean that there's now more thought involed in using Physis 2 since you want to get as many Dosis casts into the duration as possible and you could combine it with Soteria for even stronger aoe healing, adding more synergy between your different abilities.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

What could also work is something like changing Physis 2 from simply applying a regen to instead spreading your Kardia to everyone in your party for X seconds.

This would also mean that there's now more thought involed in using Physis 2 since you want to get as many Dosis casts into the duration as possible and you could combine it with Soteria for even stronger aoe healing, adding more interactions between your different abilities.

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Zoe, make it zoe thats changed to this.
Physis is basically your main aoe heal when ixochole is on cd

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Originally Posted by Recon1o6

Zoe, make it zoe thats changed to this.
Physis is basically your main aoe heal when ixochole is on cd

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The reason I chose Physis is so more thought is involved in using it, right now you can basically just press the thing whenever there is aoe damage, it's very fire and forget... then again so are most oGCD heals.

i dont think the specifics of a hypothetical should be scrutinized so much, but i agree with absurdity. making kardia aoe would feel so much better. having more skills like soteria that change what kardia does, but beyond just potency (like adding shields or mit or what have you) would also be really neat to couple with would-be physis.

sage in general is just a bunch of wasted potential

Ironically with Ast being a thing i would like to see a completely realized vision of a time based healer, fully centered around stuff like damage rewind, heal delays, damage mitigation/prevention or even delaying when the damage happens (idk how it would be balanced tho but a man can dream)

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Originally Posted by WaxSw

Ironically with Ast being a thing i would like to see a completely realized vision of a time based healer, fully centered around stuff like damage rewind, heal delays, damage mitigation/prevention or even delaying when the damage happens (idk how it would be balanced tho but a man can dream)

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Pretty much Macrocosmos which uhm, has been a quite controversial thing this raid tier. lol

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

Pretty much Macrocosmos which uhm, has been a quite controversial thing this raid tier. lol

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yeah, pretty much but I'd disagree about its controversy, better to have fun but imbalanced tools than boring balanced ones (especially when it only breaks a mechanic that can be skipped with dps)

I was thinking more into stuff like "absorbs all damage for 10s" ->gives a 15s buff-> "when buffs ends targets recieves 90% of the damage absorbed" kind of interactions which could be interesting when combined with heals that are also delayed by X amount of time but ofc balancing them could be a pain

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Originally Posted by WaxSw

Ironically with Ast being a thing i would like to see a completely realized vision of a time based healer, fully centered around stuff like damage rewind, heal delays, damage mitigation/prevention or even delaying when the damage happens (idk how it would be balanced tho but a man can dream)

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so much yes for time based healing... ast has most of what you mentioned already (macrocosmos for rewind, star, horoscope, exaltation for heal delay, CU for mitigation), theyre all just backloaded and mostly superfluous if content doesnt demand it so its often not noticed. i mean even regens on their own are also time based (healing over time), but i would like to see more time rewind or damage delay abilities, and to have back buff timer manipulations.

mitigation that turns damage taken into a dot thats easier to heal would also be neat

I want Green Mage to be a healer so we have a nice even split between BLM/RDM and WHM/GRM. I think it will have a mallet with the "focus" as the hammerhead, and be all about slamming AoE buffs/debuffs in the ground.

And on a less serious note, instead of AoEs, I wanna bop party members on head to give them buffs, as a kind of spiritual successor to FFXII measures.

I'd rather see a full rework than new healers