Healers that don't want to DPS are like DPSes who refuse to move out of AoEs.

[loreleidiangelo]

I'm always torn whenever I participate in this debate: on the one hand, I completely acknowledge that with the way healing is tuned currently, healers at the pinnacle of their skill are the ones who are dishing out no small amount of damage while still meeting healing and mitigation requirements. On the other hand, I dislike how much precedence this has taken over the actual healing role, and I sympathize with players who start out really enjoying XIV's healing classes only to wind up feeling a bit duped when they finally begin to do most endgame content and realize that a significant portion of it revolves around basically turning OFF your healing and spamming the same 4-5 buttons over and over.

I'm pleased to see that the dev team has finally acknowledged the debate either way, though. Even if YoshiP's statement DIDN'T align woth my current feelings, it would at least let me know that nothing was going to change and let me move on to a different game, lol. Maybe no big changes will come with Stormblood too, but it's made me cautiously optimistic that we might see some better healing design at 70 cap.

[aleph_null]

I'm pleased to see that the dev team has finally acknowledged the debate either way, though. Even if YoshiP's statement DIDN'T align woth my current feelings, it would at least let me know that nothing was going to change and let me move on to a different game, lol. Maybe no big changes will come with Stormblood too, but it's made me cautiously optimistic that we might see some better healing design at 70 cap.

I think one of the main issue that caused this is the performance gap between good players and average players. A good example is faust z in a9s, the best players finish the fight around 40s, with both tanks in dps stance all the time and both healers in cleric stance all the time (literally not a single healing spell cast after pull). Obviously this is possible only due to the high performance level of everyone in the group: tanks managing self heals and mitigations properly such that regens and fairy heals are enough to keep them alive, dps bringing incredible amount of dmg output to end the fight before the tanks run out of cds (which means less healing and tank stance needed), healers using their tools (e.g. prepull buffed regens/shields, fairy) while also bringing top tier dps.

Many pf/rf groups finish the fight in around 90s, which is around twice as long as the top groups, obviously in this case both tanks will eventually have to go back into tank stance due to running out of mitigation cds, healers will probably drop cleric stance somewhere around mid fight (or even earlier) to start topping up the tanks (they take tank busters every 7-10s, so once they run out of cds or self heals you'll pretty much have to heal both tanks non stop). How would you retune this fight to need more healing? If you make the tank busters hit harder or more frequently until the good players have to do a lot of healing, then most average groups probably won't have a chance to beat it and we get gordias 2.0 except now it's not about dps check but tank/heal check. I think the devs are going to the right direction by saying that they want to lessen the performance gap between players, in which case it'd be a lot easier to design contents. It's hard to say that we want contents where tanks need more tank stance uptime and healers need to heal more, when the difference between good tanks/healers and average tanks/healers is that big.