Why healing is broken and terrible, and how to fix it...

[Taika]

Having the utility of being able to keep people alive while putting out respectable damage is awesome.

This is what's appealing to me in FFXIV healers as well. I love being able to support my party with heals, buffs AND dps. If they were only about pure healing, I wouldn't play them. I think this design attracts many players to the role.

[loreleidiangelo]

This is what's appealing to me in FFXIV healers as well. I love being able to support my party with heals, buffs AND dps. If they were only about pure healing, I wouldn't play them. I think this design attracts many players to the role.

I think if the design were better implemented it wouldn't bug me as much either, but healing really is just exceptionally dull here, even with the added "responsibility" of spamming two DPS buttons between healing windows. Like, I actually enjoy Discipline Priest in World of Warcraft, which is a pure healer/deeps hybrid, but because of the way its implemented there it doesn't feel like I'm DPSing because I don't have anything else to DO, it feels like I'm DPSing as a smooth and integral part of my toolkit.

The old Cleric Stance really hammered home this disparity, IMO. A button that literally turns off your healing because there is no healing to do at the time and you might as well soup up your DPS instead.

In the interests of fairness, even the people I've spoken to who are pro healer DPS admit that healing in this game could stand to be adjusted a bit to make the split between healing/DPSing time more even. So I think the "two camps" as it were aren't actually that far apart in ideology when it comes to the future and direction of healing in XIV.

(Yes, I'm a Savage healer, before anyone comes and tells me to do hard content and still say that healing is too easy. I'm doing it, and even contrivances like Exdeath's White Hole don't do much to add challenge to the role outside of an arbitrary push away from AOE regens for the duration.)