Suggestion as to how to get people to become healers.

[Sebazy]

It's the same dilemma WoW faced when 10man Heroic (what would now be 10man version of mythic, or in ff14 terms, savage)content was the meta. There was so much healer homogenization because you only needed 2 healers in a vast majority of cases. It was even worse in their case because at the time there were Disc priests, holy priests, holy paladins, resto shaman, and resto druids, with mistweaver monks coming in MoP. Tanks also suffered a very similar overlap, something that is also here but at least as far as tanks here it's not as apparent.

It's a very different issue here though. In WoW, if your class went completely out of favour to the point where you had to switch, you lost your name, your faction work, all your accumulated gear and your even reputation within the community to some degree. As things stand right now in FFXIV (As far as tanks and healers go), you lose your relic progress and that's all. The bulk of your gear and of course, everything else with your character stays unchanged.

This is something that FFXI played on well (I'd usually start raid evenings out as SCH and end up on either BRD, WHM or BLM depending on the content and the roster we had that night) and I'm a little surprised that FFXIV hasn't picked up on that.

In the grand scheme of things, does it really matter if one of the tank/healer jobs is viewed as non meta to the others for that tiers end game content? As long as it offers a sufficiently diverse play style and is genuinely viable it'll get used and appreciated, lets not forget that a BLM could heal a significant chunk of the content in this game outside of Savage currently, any job is easily capable of any content in this game right now despite what some would have you believe. Making one of the healers a test mule to see if a buffing rather than DPSing healer would be a good sacrifice imo.

[Gemina]

More than cleric stance, the biggest issue I find with random healers is when they enter what I call the "healer panic" and totally freeze up when there's a lot of damaged party members. Which leads to deaths, because inaction is the worst action to take when people are dying. The majority of content in the game doesn't put you into these kinds of situations often, so people trying out healers become accustomed to Cure spamming the tank lazily for long periods of time. When these moments DO happen, infrequently though they do, a lot of leveling healers I feel like react poorly not just mechanically but emotionally to them and become discouraged or think they've failed, and then end up doubling down on bad habits or outright quitting the role.

I could not agree more with this. But would also like to point out how crazy over geared we can be also contributes to this. Duty Finder is also filled with intangible situations that can keep a healer of their toes, and it can often be difficult to sync with a random tank. That first pull is always the most dangerous in these situations. From my experience though, mechanics are generally followed when they are punishing, and this gives healers a lot of downtime.

Clearly though, it exists enough for the healer panic to be a thing, but I think this separates an experienced healer from an inexperienced one. It does take being put into those situations to learn how to get past them, but when I hear complaints from healers about squishy tanks even though they are the minimum requirement because now all of a sudden they have to heal more, it is expressive that there is one camp of healers who do want more crunch situations, and another camp who doesn't.

In short, a healer who wants to get better will challenge themselves. The content is available for them to do so, and they dive right back into instances that have given them trouble. If running PUGs you just kind of have to hope you get one. However, you really have to be careful how difficult you make content for the general player. I do think a slight increase in the more difficult instances would be good, and/or some kind of option to scale difficulty to avg iLv of the party.

[Miste]

To be honest I would be kind of scared what would happen to the DF if they made regular content more healing intensive...not scared for myself as a healer...but for when I am NOT on healer :x

I've seen healers who are unable to heal fights I consider to be pretty simple...and while I understand skill level varies a lot in this game the fact that it varies so much warrants consideration.

[Yeol]

To be honest I would be kind of scared what would happen to the DF if they made regular content more healing intensive...not scared for myself as a healer...but for when I am NOT on healer :x

I've seen healers who are unable to heal fights I consider to be pretty simple...and while I understand skill level varies a lot in this game the fact that it varies so much warrants consideration.

This is so true. Ask yourself, with the current player skill-level you see in daily roulettes, would you pass half of them to play a healer role?

I got all of my birds, and while farming them I had to deal with lots of bad co-healers. Over healing, not healing at the right time. Not keeping an eye on mechanics, dying a lot. Lots of MP issues, waste LB3 but I've learned to be a better healer thanks to them.

24 man raid is and example of people playing healers as sub roles. Clearly it is not going very well.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

To be honest I would be kind of scared what would happen to the DF if they made regular content more healing intensive...not scared for myself as a healer...but for when I am NOT on healer :x

I've seen healers who are unable to heal fights I consider to be pretty simple...and while I understand skill level varies a lot in this game the fact that it varies so much warrants consideration.

You might actually be surprised. I'll again point to Weeping City or Final Steps of Faith. Sure, they have plenty of bad players but people eventually managed. The start of an expansion opens the floor to changing things up. Provided you keep the increased difficulty a reasonably consistent curve upward, plenty will adjust. They might just complain they can't watch Netflix while healing anymore.

[Zojha]

I'll again point to Weeping City or Final Steps of Faith. Sure, they have plenty of bad players but people eventually managed.

Considering Weeping City is prerequisite for Dun Scaith and Final Steps of Faith is prerequisite for Expert roulette, that line of reasoning would imply that everyone in Dun Scaith or Expert is a decent-ish player, as they managed to pass the (supposed) skill checks in the instances you named.

Everyone will have made their own experiences there, so... you gotta check the validity of that statement for yourself.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Considering Weeping City is prerequisite for Dun Scaith and Final Steps of Faith is prerequisite for Expert roulette, that line of reasoning would imply that everyone in Dun Scaith or Expert is a decent-ish player, as they managed to pass the (supposed) skill checks in the instances you named.

Everyone will have made their own experiences there, so... you gotta check the validity of that statement for yourself.

Dun Scaith, yes... Expert less so. Experts aren't scaled nearly to the equivalent degree. Case in point, Weeping City is considerably harder than Xelphatol despite actually allowing a lower min ilvl. Likewise, Final Steps is also harder than the dungeons that come later. I mean, The Vault and Aery are arguably the hardest dungeons released in Heavenward and they came out two years ago with no prerequisites except level. Suffice it to say, they don't really scale content on a curve.

[Zojha]

Suffice it to say, they don't really scale content on a curve.

They don't, but that wasn't the point. The point was that if people truly managed to overcome said content and the supposed skill checks by getting better, they would in all likelihood retain that skill in all future content, unless they took long breaks in between to unlearn things. If Nidhogg had taught you how to rotate CDs, you won't unlearn that in the following dungeons, you'll use that to your advantage in the following dungeons.
Therefore, on average, the player skill beyond those points should be considerably higher regardless of how the content afterward is tuned. If it is not, the player either took a break or didn't actually get better in the first place.

Difficulty curve is unrelated to that. The idea of a difficulty curve is to have the difficulty of the content keep up with the learning curve of the individual in order to keep it engaging. The issue there is that the learning curve of individuals is, well, individual, so the difficulty curves would have to be as well to serve their function. Hence, games sometimes try to employ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynami...ulty_balancing

How to do that in MMOs... I personally don't have the faintest. But it's tangential to the topic at best, so /huh.

[Sebazy]

24 man raids are kind of an oddball in FFXIV though, Ozma was pretty rough early on but now people have enough HP to generally survive some mistakes that would have been a guaranteed group wipe when it was current, thus it isn't really the roadblock it initially was. This wasn't helped by the second and final bosses being duoable with ease if albeit slowly =(

[Kurogaea]

I'm not all for removal of cleric stance, but it makes the most sense that healers shouldn't HAVE to dps to make a group win anything. If 4 dps classes need help from a healer to push dps I think they're doing something wrong.

My thoughts on the trinity is that they should've just went full on trinity from the start. removing it now would be wierd, though PvP'ers are used to it by now. (no cleric stance)