PSA - Cleric Stance and vote kicking

[Naunet]

Then content would entirely be designed around managing healer's mana, and nothing else. Medica, Cure and Cure II would only be the button you press, save for an occasional cooldown when healing is too intensive.

Believe it or not, but a lot of people find that boring.

1. Perhaps that's a sign that healing spells should be more interesting than just "single target", "stronger single target", "aoe". Considering other game devs have managed to come up with more complicated designs, I think we can stand to expect more from SE.

2. You don't heal in a vacuum. Good, complex boss mechanics make even the simplest healing fun.

[Fyce]

1. Perhaps that's a sign that healing spells should be more interesting than just "single target", "stronger single target", "aoe". Considering other game devs have managed to come up with more complicated designs, I think we can stand to expect more from SE.

2. You don't heal in a vacuum. Good, complex boss mechanics make even the simplest healing fun.

1. You said that you wanted to do more healing to the point where you cannot stop casting healing spells or your party dies. There's no way to make that "interesting" in FFXIV. You're bound to be pushing a few set of "core healing skills" all day, just like everyone else. That's how the game works.
Of course, you have some buffs and oGCD that can help breaking the monotony, but that's pretty much it. Even if you do a combo system like the other job have, like cast Cure, combo with Cura, then Curaga or whatnot (hello overhealing), you'd still be doing a 1, 2, 3 combo all day long. Not mentioning that Scholar can pretty much be deleted from the game, or completly reworked, because once shields are applied, there's nothing much to do.

2. There isn't much type of damage to heal... Tank AA, Tank busters, Raid AoE, and DoTs. Oh and esuna some debuffs too. No matter how you look at it, every fight is like that. Damage is damage. You shield people from it, and then you heal what has to be healed.

3. My own addition. This is Final Fantasy. White mages, the "default healer", the most vanilla one, has one of the most powerful spell in the franchise: Holy. Since Final Fantasy I, White mages are doing damage through white magic. White magic isn't only healing spells. You should have a look at the lore book some day, to understand what white magic has to offer, at least in the lore of FFXIV. I mean... the conjurer quest line is all about that.
Healers, in FFXIV, always had quite a bunch of DPS skills. Scholar even comes from Arcanist ffs. That's how healing works in this game. There's no "I picked healer so I'll only heal!". That's not how it was designed. It's not because some other game have healers doing 100% healing that it must be the same in every other game.
In short terms, healing, in FFXIV, includes damage spells, and using them is part of the role. Going againt that is going against the core design of the healer role in FFXIV. Like BLM going "ice mages", that's now how they are supposed to work.

I understand that some people want to be like Sylphie, and only be casting healing spells. But that's not how it's done in FFXIV. That's all. And this thread is here to remind people about that fact.

[Naunet]

<snip>

You missed my points entirely.

You assertion that casting Cure, Cure II, and Medica only is boring means that the design of the heals is boring. And that is true. The healing spells in this game are some of the least inspired I've ever encountered. Rather than using that as a defense, encourage SE to actually put some real thought into healing spells.

Secondly, not all mechanics = damage to heal. When I said you don't heal in a vacuum, I meant that when you are healing, you are also engaging with the rest of the fight and dealing with whatever mechanics are tossed your way - be it proper positioning, avoiding AoE, splitting up into different groups... Though again, your response makes it clear that SE lacks ingenuity when it comes to boss encounter mechanics if "Tank AA, tank buster, raid aoe, and dots" are the only things you could really think of.

[Zojha]

Though again, your response makes it clear that SE lacks ingenuity when it comes to boss encounter mechanics if "Tank AA, tank buster, raid aoe, and dots" are the only things you could really think of.

Well, in fairness: There aren't a great many mechanics you can actually do for tanks and healers in particular. It's always going to boil down to getting healthbars up (either because they were damaged by unavoidable damage or because they start out at 1), switching or resetting aggro or mitigating a hit you can't dodge. It's that category that the person quoted is alluding to - Trinity exclusive mechanics.

Whenever there's an avoidable component, that part of the mechanic isn't healer/tank specific. When there's a stack mechanic, everyone needs to stack. If there's a gaze mechanic, everyone needs to turn etc. Those kinds of mechanics also work in non-trinity games, you can often translate them 1:1 even. That's a different category of mechanics, because they have nothing to do with healers, tanks or DPS in particular. You could even use many of them in a jump'n run style game ala Super Mario. Healers and tanks do need to deal with those as well of course (which feeds your second point from the previous post), but you don't need them for them.

I personally find the latter a lot more engaging than the prior, but that's just showing my preference for non-trinity gameplay. And it's tangential to the topic at best, so /huh.

[Naunet]

Well, in fairness: There aren't a great many mechanics you can actually do for tanks and healers in particular.

"You don't heal in a vacuum" refers to the entire fight, not just what damage is going out to a tank. Thus my statement that engaging boss mechanics can make even simplistic healing fun because the encounter overall is interesting.