Should healers now be allowed to play how they choose to play?

[Legion88]

Not to mention the issue of what one does if all relevant buffs are up and nobody needs healing.

This is not as big a problem as people think, for following reasons:

• healers also need a minimum of damaging skills for solo duties
• Buffs and debuffs can have a short duration, so reapplying will fill downtime
• Some skills can be channeled, so you can't use other skills during their uptime

So if people have nothing to do, after all buffs/debuffs are up and running they can throw in one or two damage skills as last resort of filler.

[ToasterMan]

I hope SE takes from what they did with healers in PvP. I might not like the PvP in this game as a whole right now but I was going to say something good about it I'd say that I feel like a true support there. I might not be able to do any damage but that doesn't mean I can't help my team in other ways when I don't need to heal.

[Connor]

I hope SE takes from what they did with healers in PvP. I might not like the PvP in this game as a whole right now but I was going to say something good about it I'd say that I feel like a true support there. I might not be able to do any damage but that doesn't mean I can't help my team in other ways when I don't need to heal.

This one the reasons that I've found myself enjoying PvP so much; you get a real sense of what a full healer/support could be like. Though of course they can't copy + paste this into PvE because it's a different thing entirely

[aleph_null]

We already know that they're "revamping the battle system for 4.0". Funnily enough, a revamp of the battle system is what's needed to accomodate more variation in healer playstyles (healers that focus on support, healers that focus on dps, etc)

I think one problem with ffxiv atm is that the performance gap between good players and bad players is too big (which is kinda addressed by the battle system revamp). For example let's take faust z in a9s, a straight dummy fight for the dps, with tank busters and a few aoe weaved in. If we look at the top raid groups, they finish the fight in 40-50s, with both tanks in dps stance all the time and both healers in cleric stance all the time, all the incoming damage to the tank are covered by prepull shield and regens as well as selene's embraces. That's the kind of thing that's possible with good coordination between tanks and healers (managing defensive cds and utilities, timing self heals and pet heals) as well as exceptional amount of dps brought by the 4 dps players. So if we look at the fight from this perspective, the amount of mitigation and healing check is "ridiculously low" that it allows both healers to not even cast a single healing spell throughout the fight, while the tanks are in dps stance the whole time.

But on the other hand, average PF/RF players probably take like 1:30 to finish the same fight, the tanks might be required to go back into tank stance due to running out of defensive cds and healers (or at least one of them) are required to continuously cast heals between tank busters, so if the healing/tank mitigation requirements are raised to prevent the good players from casting so little to no heals at all, the average players won't even have a chance to clear the fight. Is it important for average healers to heal that little and weave in so much dps? Not really, but those top players set the bar for what's optimal, and ideally everyone should be aiming for that, just like how every dps player should aim to replicate the optimal rotations as shown in the guides made by the good players. It's just that healers' optimal play depend on the other people in the party a lot more compared to dps/tanks' optimal play.

I'd say that this discussion might not be relevant anymore when 4.0 hits, but as of now and probably until a few more months later, healers should try to dps, assuming the situation allows them to (if the party is undergeared, the tank is bad at managing cds, dps are taking unnecessary damage, then you may not have time to dps).

[Lambdafish]

My suggestion would be following:

AST:

• Half the cooldown of the card skills
• reduce cardbuff duration by 1/3
• optional set Draw on the GCD

This would make ASTs more busy with their cards and reduce the amount of time they have for dealing damage.

The problem with this is that you are solely balancing cards based on the amount of healing required for dungeons, and basing it on a lot of downtime. AST is good right now because cards are great in raiding, and it will be coming a lot more difficult (read: appealing) to play if people have to juggle cards with healing (especially as this would be seen as a massive nerf). I feel like you would need to compensate this with more ways for AST to generate downtime to use their cards.

This is why balancing healers to do anything other than DPS is difficult, as it will become part of the identity of the job, which needs to be balanced around both the lax healing of dungeons, and the intense healing of raids, and I feel like what needs to be achieved first is reducing the gap from the bottom end as well as giving healers more things to do.

[Feyona]

I hope SE takes from what they did with healers in PvP. I might not like the PvP in this game as a whole right now but I was going to say something good about it I'd say that I feel like a true support there. I might not be able to do any damage but that doesn't mean I can't help my team in other ways when I don't need to heal.

when doing pvp I still dps and spread dots and shadow flare to slow them down, cant kill players very easily but can still help a bit. Players can take alot of damge so plenty to do dont really need cleric to keep busy

[Shurrikhan]

This one the reasons that I've found myself enjoying PvP so much; you get a real sense of what a full healer/support could be like. Though of course they can't copy + paste this into PvE because it's a different thing entirely.

While not a different thing entirely—the point is still to kill more so than to survive—the idea of having 4 players of hopefully near equal skill and potential output against another 4 does mean that healing requirements will scale with DPS. It's its own balancing act, so to speak, although one that recenters party play (around the highest output player, the healer, rather than whoever would be the highest effective output player in PvE—usually a dps). How one player is mostly able to take on the coordinated efforts of 4 unless focused first, however, says a lot about the relative strength of healers in this game (pretty damn high).

The removal of Cleric Stance made healers less adaptable to varying enemy outputs, or less able to take advantage of enemy disarray, but as healing output has always been far stronger than DPS, core gameplay never really shifted. Unless the enemy is not playing well enough to allow for the full use of a heal, a 600 potency Cure II or a 1050 Regen is simply a far better use of a GCD than a 210 Stone III, and now that there are only 3 DPS sources to be worried about, having nearly triple the output of any DPS is nearly sufficient to take on the output of a 4-man as a single player. In a way, the removal of Cleric Stance was a circuitous buff to anyone who was already full-time healing simply because there's no longer a way for one team to push through heals indirectly, focusing down a target while the enemy dps is too spread to take advantage of the gap in healing. It removed strategic variance, simplifying healer gameplay (at least until such time as what few teams weren't already focusing the healer, or to split burn targets from their healer's line of sight first then realized how essential it was to do so).

In PvE, however, it becomes a lot more clear that there will only ever be a single primary output (whatever in itself causes completion of the encounter). This doesn't have to be dps. If a boss needed to be topped off as waves of adds came in to finish it off, all healing dealt to the boss would then be the primary output, and the dps to kill of adds or key mobs or structures or whatever would be secondary (if there's no real time constraint involved, then maybe even tertiary). Mitigation dealt for the boss would be primary, as it's saving boss health, the encounter criteria, but any dealt for the party or the tanks themselves would be secondary. So on and so forth.

Therefore it's not so much that "everyone must be able to dps" as "everyone should be capable of primary-level contribution, even if indirectly" (cards, trick attack, etc). It's just that we haven't yet had an encounter that has flipped the primary output to anything else. In PvP, a 1 per 3 ratio of healing is rarely superfluous and far overwhelms offensive power, so with the two output forms being nearly equal, and strategy being about reducing the enemy's access to that output, survival seems as important as victory. But the primary output is still the same; strategies to work around or apply it have just been limited.

[Vibronix]

Saying that healers should DPS because it is most efficient means that encounters are not designed to be challenging for healers, because if healers can regularly afford to DPS, then there really isn't much healing for them to do in the first place, and Square should replace the healer role with a third DPS.

Make encounters require more healing, more debuffs that have to be removed, and up the DPS of DPS players instead.

[Lunafreya]

How is this still going, honestly? Every class is extremely effective when using your toolkit to max advantage. If you are just letting things stay on your hotbar without use then it doesn't seem like there's a point. I don't hold lazy healers ransom but it makes my blood boil to see someone regen the tank and cure every bit of hp lost. Use your FULL toolkit to be useful. A tank is a tank just fyi... he/she won't need a heal every hit and if it comes to that all it leads to is a very boring atmosphere.

[Legion88]

Saying that healers should DPS because it is most efficient means that encounters are not designed to be challenging for healers, because if healers can regularly afford to DPS, then there really isn't much healing for them to do in the first place, and Square should replace the healer role with a third DPS.

Make encounters require more healing, more debuffs that have to be removed, and up the DPS of DPS players instead.

This is more or less the situation in a min ilvl party with average players and this is for what the encounters are balanced. The Problem kicks in with overgearing just a little bit and a healer, even average and below, will starting to see downtime, and every ilvl increases this downtime.
As you see, a fight balanced for a specific minimum ilvl of an average party will be facroll, with the gear we are mostly wearing when the duty comes out. For example Xelphatol, balanced for ilvl 210, average ilvl of most players i met there was ilvl 235+, another one the actual "experts", balanced for ilvl 230, most people in there are wearing ilvl 250 on the lowside up to BiS.

How is this still going, honestly? Every class is extremely effective when using your toolkit to max advantage. If you are just letting things stay on your hotbar without use then it doesn't seem like there's a point. I don't hold lazy healers ransom but it makes my blood boil to see someone regen the tank and cure every bit of hp lost. Use your FULL toolkit to be useful. A tank is a tank just fyi... he/she won't need a heal every hit and if it comes to that all it leads to is a very boring atmosphere.

You are missing the point the thread went...
We are no more disscussing if healers should be allowed to be "lazy", like this sounds in some ears. We are disscussing what other ways there are or healers could do to not just spam some simple damage skills but being useful for the party while in downtime.