Suggestion as to how to get people to become healers.

[Ama_Hamada]

Healers currently do a fraction of the damage a DPS does. A decent fraction, definitely not marginalized, but not as much as them for sure. And I personally think that healers as a whole are in a perfectly fine positionin the meta(Though WHM could use a smidge more utility for raid comps). I am opposed to people thinking that healer roles need more DPS though, because DPS isn't their job and so many are just outright obsessed with it. This whole topic is "hey, let's just take out Cleric Stance so we can always DPS and heal too" which is a way to say "Give me more DPS". And while healer numbers are good now, I all too well remember the late 2.x patch cycle days of WHM spamming holy and only occasionally slapping a bene on tanks in most content, and them all saying "I want a Holyga for 3.0 please, stone III isn't enough". Then you don't get healers- you get DPSes who can also heal. And yes, there have been times in FF14 where healers did damage on par with DPS, especially in AoE. I'd prefer we don't end up with hilariously overpowered white mages again, thanks. DPSing as a healer is cool to me, not integral but cool. It should be a side thing, not something people insist on having more of every patch cycle and complain that "Healers will drop healing if they can't DPS". I'm not saying they shouldn't have any- I'm saying they're doing fine and don't need to keep asking for more of it.

But then again, you just think I'm trolling the thread, and am spreading false information.

People are not asking for more dps then what we are scaling off now. People want more people to play healer and think it is not a good idea to take out cleric stance to achieve that and scale off mind. This does not make you magically DPS for more. Then someone said we need to do less DPS if we are to take away cleric stance and it will be offset with more uptime. This is not what is going to happen and what I am personally auguring against. Now please stop putting words in people's mouths because of your personal grievances of the past, no one is trolling here, at least not the person you quoted.

[Atlaworks]

Snip

But... I didn't say they were. They said I was. What?

Anyway. My stance(hah) on the subject is that no stance dancing = less risk in DPSing = more time spent DPSing = more DPS. Numbers would need to be balanced because of that. And I'm still of the belief that if someone decides they don't want to be a healer because they can't do as much damage as they want to, they're not in the right job to begin with. You don't get more healers by making healers better at doing the exact opposite of their role.

[bswpayton]

I've desperately tried to get used to CS in this game but no matter how proficient I became with it, it's such a pain in the ass (especially with my latency) that it's driven me away from healer even though I loved healing in other games. 75% of my attention in a dungeon being consumed by a single stance toggle is not a fun sort of 'complexity' for me.

You would think this thread was askin to remove damage spells from healers all together all the backlash its getting. I just dont see how that many of the fanbase base them playing a healer off of one move that acutally seems pretty crazy to me.

[Noni]

The issue here is that the stance goes on a 3 second cd at that point, which can mean death and/or wipe. Just saying..

Benediction, Just saying.....

[Ama_Hamada]

But... I didn't say they were. They said I was. What?Anyway. My stance(hah) on the subject is that no stance dancing = less risk in DPSing = more time spent DPSing = more DPS. Numbers would need to be balanced because of that. And I'm still of the belief that if someone decides they don't want to be a healer because they can't do as much damage as they want to, they're not in the right job to begin with. You don't get more healers by making healers better at doing the exact opposite of their role.

If you are doing it well, there be no difference in DPS. There is a small fraction of time where you can't do anything after casting a gcd, so there is no clipping animation lag that hurts you going from healing > cleric. For whm you have beni using it as a DPS tool so there is that as well, regen, during its down time, using cleric without clipping. There is some clipping with Lustrate because it is ogcd and tied to the drawback of using it while cleric is on. Basically if you play cleric correctly, there is no DPS loss having it vs not having it and having it scale off mind, so the damage needs to scale as the same as now if they where to say remove it and have it scale off mind.

Also keep in mind meany leveling DF can be perma cleric as a SCH.

[Kazrah]

Benediction, Just saying.....

How about for the remaining 4 minutes and 57 seconds? Cuddle?

[Venjenz]

Remove the need to cleric stance.

Have the damage scale of MIND similar to how tanks got the VIT buff.

But even with the VIT thing, nobody wants to tank. Something tells me the "don't want to be a healer" thing isn't solely based on Cleric stance.

[Kosmos992k]

How to get more people to become healers? Not sure, but getting more people to become tanks didn't work before. Of course that might have been because rather than rewarding career tanks who support the community in DF, the actual rewards offered rewarded tanks who played a tank as a second role and then ground out the requirements before hanging up their shield - so to speak.

To promote healer as a role, I think that there need to be rewards for healers in general, not simply ones who spam content to obtain a shiny and then quit. I'm not thinking in terms of adventurer in need rewards, which are almost always headed for the tank (though most recently I saw it as healer). I'm thinking in terms of a mount, or special glamour gear that can be achieved by actually healing various content regularly, not simply spamming end-game dungeons that statics already have on speed-run farm.

I don't think you can do much to the role itself. Making it a hybrid DPS is as boring as anything could be. We don't need more DPS, we have plenty of DPS roles & jobs. So what do you do? Make healing more spectacular? Sure, but will that bring people to the role? Like tanking, people either want to play that role or not. If they don't then they wont.

I think the 'best' way to get more healers to the game is to bring a different kind of healer. A close range, physical, healer - with some ranged skills so as to prevent them from being excluded. This would be a very different kind of healer to play, and potentially a lot more mobile. It would alter the way players think of healing, and provide a new style of healer play. Similarly I feel that for tanks an agility tank would be a useful addition because it's a style of tanking we do not currently have in the game, and fundamentally different from the current tanks.

A physical healer could do close range single target and group healing, single target ranged healing, as well as the usual buffs/debuffs. They could heal through the use of a physical device instead of spells. I'm not suggesting a comically oversized hypodermic needle, but similar to PUG/MONK a hand to hand healer would 'slap' a curative on you, or perhaps use an air or ground burst delivery (The Holy Healing Grenade of Antioch?) for healing agents in a AoE heal for multiple targets.

Anyway, I don't think tweaks will help more healers, I think we need new gameplay to attract a different kind of player, someone who doesn't like casters, but wants to heal.

[Vexander]

Not a bad suggestion, Kosmos. Reminds me of the Dancer speculation for Stormblood. I could see them as a highly mobile, melee-ranged healer.

That said, if we want to encourage people to heal more with the jobs we have now, I do feel Healing needs to be made friendlier. I know people from other games who were career healers who don't touch this game because Healers are expected to DPS. I know others who were career healers in other games who play this one but don't heal because of the same reason, and for a lot of them it focuses around Cleric Stance and how damaging it can be. I know healers in this game who heal -because- they can contribute to the group DPS in fights and enjoy doing that rather than staring into space waiting for someone to take damage.

I think its safe to say the Healers-doing-DPS issue is one that presents a significant boundary to those who would consider playing a healer. I don't think its fair to viciously curtail healers being able to DPS as they can currently. Logically the way to bring those who -would- play a Healer around would be to make DPS'ing as a Healer more available. Removal of Cleric Stance is an option, either adding Talents or tweaking mind to bring Healer DPS up to the proper numbers. Alternatively, take it off the global cooldown entirely and give it no cooldown at all.

The one thing I doubt anyone will argue for though, is that we need -fewer- healers.

[Shougun]

Maybe if the cleric punishment was damage not healing, mess up in cleric stance and your damage is punished. Although I don't think all the healers should have the same stance, like tanks I think there should be some variety in play styles but we should of course strive for similar end results so they're approximately similarly desired.

So for example instead of reduced healing (the primary purpose of healers) cleric stance: boosts the damage of all offensive spells, when a healing spell is cast your damage boost is reduced shortly. Other things could be activating cleric stance costs mana and deactivating it returns mana, perhaps even granting more mana back based on the damage you were able to do, but if you cast a healing spell the effect fades (and thus you effectively eat the mana cost rather than gaining/refunding). Or Talrean had a nice one with Astral stacks, and the stacks fading on a healing spell (where I think it could be nice if turning off cleric stance yourself prevents your stacks from dropping due to healing, can drop due to timer still but if you go back into cleric on time you'd maintain your stacks).

Anyway I think healer's primary purpose shouldn't be punished, or at least one of the healer's stance should be like that.