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

[Bourne_Endeavor]

That is DECIDEDLY untrue.

Compare these world firsts to when the content released for the tier:
http://www.sk-gaming.com/content/163...rld_first_list

The fastest I recall happening recently was Mythic Emeral Dream which took about a week. Deltascape Savage was cleared the very same day.

I stand corrected then. I swore hearing WoW raids had been considerably reduced in their difficulty similar to FFXIV. Granted, their respective tiers are expected to last longer since they won't be another until the following expansion but fair enough.

That's probably because the FFXIV playerbase starts to immediately whine if a fight is not clearable the very same day it is released. A3S anyone?

Actually, A4S was more the issue because many perceived it a boring fight. Likewise, a major complaint with Gordias wasn't the difficulty per se but the gear lock. Living Liquid, and especially Manipulatior, were literally impossible to finish no matter what you did. Flawless DPS performance? Wipe. You needed weapon upgrades to even scratch those DPS checks. Personally, I don't find that type of difficulty fun since it's a complete waste of my time. I could push the job to its absolute limits and would fail regardless. May as well wait 3-5 weeks when I have tomestome and a tier 1 accessory.

[RichardButte]

I stand corrected then. I swore hearing WoW raids had been considerably reduced in their difficulty similar to FFXIV. Granted, their respective tiers are expected to last longer since they won't be another until the following expansion but fair enough.

You might've been hearing about WoW raids going to a "4 tier" system, which is LFR (duty finder raids), Normal, Heroic, and Mythic. It used to be LFR, Flex, Normal, Heroic, but they shifted the titles around and made Mythic require 20 people.

Or you might've heard about Emerald Nightmare which was the first raid of the xpac but WAS beaten very quickly by WoW's standards.

Either way, no worries because there can be a lot of confusing info coming from the WoW community.

I just hope SSavage takes a while to beat because it'd be nice for XIV to earn some more "street cred" on that subject. Even if players will never actually raid SSavage, they tend to like knowing that they'll never want for challenge in an MMO.

Thinking about it now, the key difference between XIV's raiding and WoW's is probably this:

WoW: Damage comes out at a steady pace and needs to be healed constantly, healers don't contribute any significant DPS (unless that's how they heal). Some damage is avoidable but damage that could've been avoided is often immediately lethal. Most encounters are gear-checks, where healers will simply need to heal X unavoidable damage in Y seconds or players will start dying.

XIV: Damage comes out in spikes but most of it can be avoided, healers can contribute ~50-75% of a full DPS' damage. Healer DPS is supposedly not factored into balancing raid encounters (though some say it must be on certain savage fights).

The real key is that healers almost ALWAYS have healing to do in WoW. It's structured very differently in XIV.

[Kazrah]

The real key is that healers almost ALWAYS have healing to do in WoW. It's structured very differently in XIV.

That doesn't mean that the system's broken. It just means that the system is different, which is a good thing for people who like having a healing style that isn't like any other major MMORPG.

[RichardButte]

That doesn't mean that the system's broken. It just means that the system is different

XIV's healing isn't broken because it's different from WoW's healing.

XIV's healing is broken because healers spend more time DPSing than healing.

Imagine you're an artist (because you love making art). One day, you get hired by a graphic design firm.

However, on your first day of work, they only give you one hour worth of artwork to create. After that, they tell you that they don't have any more work for you, but that they instead want you to go clean the dishes in the cafeteria.

And so it goes, day after day: you go in, do an hour of the actual work you have passion for, then get relegated to doing dishes in the cafeteria for the remaining 7 hours of your shift. You realize that this isn't what you WANT to do, because you didn't apply to be a dishwasher, yet that's exactly what you've become.

This is how I feel about healing in XIV: I wanted to HEAL, but I inevitably spend the majority of my time DPSing because that's all there is to do.

So, I did the smart thing and rerolled DPS. I figure if the game is going to have me DPSing most of the time anyway, I may as well be doing it on a class with an interesting and engaging rotation. /shrug

The mileage of others may vary, I suppose, but when an artist spends 1 hour doing artwork and then 7 doing dishes, they're a dishwasher in the eyes of that company. I call healing broken not because healing itself doesn't work (it actually works TOO well), but because classes labeled as "healers" spend the majority of their time performing the actions meant for another role.

I find it hard to belive you are running out of mp with using all your CDs correctly

I rarely run out of MP, but if I do, it's because I was DPSing on what I thought would be a smooth run and everything very suddenly goes to crap.

But again, it's not even me running out of MP that's the problem. Most of the time, the issue is that I'm simply bored and DPSing when I rolled a class that was supposed to heal.

[Snow_Princess]

XIV's healing isn't broken because it's different from WoW's healing.

XIV's healing is broken because healers spend more time DPSing than healing.

Imagine you're an artist (because you love making art). One day, you get hired by a graphic design firm.

However, on your first day of work, they only give you one hour worth of artwork to create. After that, they tell you that they don't have any more work for you, but that they instead want you to go clean the dishes in the cafeteria.

And so it goes, day after day: you go in, do an hour of the actual work you have passion for, then get relegated to doing dishes in the cafeteria for the remaining 7 hours of your shift. You realize that this isn't what you WANT to do, because you didn't apply to be a dishwasher, yet that's exactly what you've become.

This is how I feel about healing in XIV: I wanted to HEAL, but I inevitably spend the majority of my time DPSing because that's all there is to do.

So, I did the smart thing and rerolled DPS. I figure if the game is going to have me DPSing most of the time anyway, I may as well be doing it on a class with an interesting and engaging rotation. /shrug

The mileage of others may vary, I suppose, but when an artist spends 1 hour doing artwork and then 7 doing dishes, they're a dishwasher in the eyes of that company. I call healing broken not because healing itself doesn't work (it actually works TOO well), but because classes labeled as "healers" spend the majority of their time performing the actions meant for another role.



I rarely run out of MP, but if I do, it's because I was DPSing on what I thought would be a smooth run and everything very suddenly goes to crap.

But again, it's not even me running out of MP that's the problem. Most of the time, the issue is that I'm simply bored and DPSing when I rolled a class that was supposed to heal.

That is a lack of experience issue, sorry. You can be aware enough where you can spot risks like that. I'll give you an example what I did on PLD just now. 60 popped for leveling, and to experiment (I really did not know the place that well) I only did mega pulls with hallowed ready. Doing it the first time showed me the group comp was not exactly able to handle pulls like it consistently , so I kept doing them only if hallowed was ready, no wipes but I did get dangerously close a few times, pop hallowed and kept doing the smaller pulls. When you need to say blow all your CDs to keep mp up, people taking damage or w/e then speak up, you are not really complaining about game mechanics with this issue.

You are just ast right? ill keep things limited to that, I been speaking on all 3 healers since the thread was "healing issue" When you are dpsing, and you start to run low ish mp, say 70 Lucid Dreaming, however if you are 50-70% with an aoe buff ready, Lucid Dreaming, aoe buff, then celestial opposition. Also celestial opposition is a aoe stun as well as lengthening how long your buffs last. AST should never be running out of mp unless it is due to MASS raising, they have the MOST tools to recover mp out of the 3 healers. When you need to heal bomb remember your CDS! Synastry, Largesse, Essential Dignity, Lightspeed

Also for the other person you are replying to, no it is not broken, it is just a different style.

I also do not look at it as only healing or only tanking.. I look at it how to fully optimize and perform the best of your ability to move things along. You do not HAVE to dps but it speeds things up.

[RichardButte]

That is a lack of experience issue, sorry.

When the DPS perform immaculately for the first two bosses so I feel comfortable DPSing, then they suddenly eat every other AoE on the last boss, what "experience" could've helped there?

I read the situation for what it appeared to be and acted accordingly, trying to get the boss down ASAP because I thought I was with a wholly competent group due to how well they played.

It doesn't happen often, but it's still annoying when it does happen, and when it DOESN'T happen, it's equally annoying because I rolled a healer but spend nearly all my time dealing damage instead.

Also for the other person you are replying to, no it is not broken, it is just a different style.

Here's the thing...

If RDM was introduced to the game as a DPS, yet was more effective as a healer than as a DPS (and as a result were asked to spend 80% of their time healing instead of dealing damage), RDMs would scream bloody murder, and rightfully so. The DPS forums would be on FIRE with threads saying, "This class says it's a DPS! Why am I a healer?!"

Meanwhile, healers have been doing more DPS than healing since at least 2.0, and no one bats an eyelash.

It'd be one thing if there was a class that healed THROUGH DPS (like two of WoW's healers do) and leveling the class that did that was a choice a player made, but all three healing classes run into the same issue: there's just not much healing that needs to be done (especially when running in a static where people will typically not get hit).

If you don't want to call it "broken", okay, but there are less kind ways of putting it, like how calling these classes "healers" is a bald-faced lie when they spend far more time dealing damage than healing.

If you're a player like me who enjoys playing a healer because you like actual healing, you're SoL in XIV, and I'm not sure why more people aren't at least saying, "Yeah, I it'd be nice to feel like I was doing more in my actual PRIMARY role..."

So OP wants healing to be done like WoW? Well, go play WoW?

I want healing in FFXIV to be as fun and engaging as DPSing in FFXIV.

And no, that's not an unreasonable request.

[hydralus]

I want healing in FFXIV to be as fun and engaging as DPSing in FFXIV.

And no, that's not an unreasonable request.

It kinda is, when 'fun' and 'engaging' is just based off what you feel and not some measurable metric. The idea of just needing to 'heal more than you DPS' sounds like an asinine metric for what would satisfy you on how a role should play out.

And as suggested, if WoW does it the way you like, maybe go play that and don't try to change a game that does it different. Variety is nice.

[loreleidiangelo]

I stand corrected then. I swore hearing WoW raids had been considerably reduced in their difficulty similar to FFXIV. Granted, their respective tiers are expected to last longer since they won't be another until the following expansion but fair enough.

This is also incorrect though. :/ WoW has had four raids since Legion's launch last August - Emerald Nightmare, Trials of Valor (lol), Nighthold and now Tomb of Sargeras. It's not really relevant to the OP so I AM sorry to keep badgering semantics, but WoW has consistently delivered on engaging difficult raid content every three months or so with Legion.

I mean, the nuances of their raid design is a source for a whole other topic, though, and not exactly pertinent to the discussion here. In the interests of fairness, pushing progression Mythic raid healers on Tomb were actually expected to churn out SOME DPS, but nothing quite compared to the quantity we do here.

Here's the logs for all the groups that have actually uploaded their KJ (final boss) parses to Warcraftlogs. You can see that outside of some very ambitious Discipline Priests (the healer class that literally heals through DPSing enemies), all of the healers are hovering around positively MINISCULE DPS values otherwise. About 1/20th the value of actual DPS classes,
for reference. In XIV terms, this means that healers would be doing about...250 DPS on average on Neo Exdeath, and I'd hazard that the "average" healer is probably pushing closer to 1k - 4 times the value of what's expected/possible from WoW healers.

Even looking at Wildstar, which follows similar raid schematics to FFXIV/WoW...their top healers are doing about 1/10th the DPS of their top DPS - half of what we're doing here. And that's Redmoon Terror, a raid that guilds have had on farm for a while because Wildstar has such infrequent content updates due to its low population. (It came out almost exactly a year ago, to wit.)

Now, who can say what the aggregate causes of this disparity actually ARE? Could just be damage modifiers, where healers are maybe spending the same CPM doing DPS spells that we are here, just ours are insanely highly tuned? Could be that actual healing mechanics are balanced in such a manner that they're the focus of a healers' gameplay and not finding generous damage windows? Could be that resource generation in those two games is set up in a way where healers have "downtime" conserving mana, and thus don't DPS? (I know it's not that way in WoW anymore, but could be in W*.) I mean, it's hard to pin down actual factors, but if I had to hazard a guess it really is just that healing is set up to be too powerful in this game, likely because the developers didn't want newbies to fail at it and didn't quite perceive how it would affect gameplay at the higher echelons of skill. The result of that is that the actual mechanic of floofing life bars is relatively trivial, and that the true "challenge" of healing in FFXIV is to see how much time you can spend doing something that isn't commonly associated with your given role.

I mean, more to the point, I GUARANTEE the developers of this game aren't going to do anything to change that - they can prattle on about how they don't like Cleric Stance or how healer DPS isn't "expected" or WTFever, but the fact is that short of a massive blanket healer nerf to potencies and cooldowns, the healer DPS meta is here to stay and they ABSOLUTELY will not risk doing said nerf because of how it would potentially make the role "new player unfriendly"...the total antithesis of this entire games' design.

[Naunet]

Even looking at Wildstar, which follows similar raid schematics to FFXIV/WoW...their top healers are doing about 1/10th the DPS of their top DPS - half of what we're doing here. And that's Redmoon Terror, a raid that guilds have had on farm for a while because Wildstar has such infrequent content updates due to its low population. (It came out almost exactly a year ago, to wit.)

I bet a lot of those healers are also spellslingers using dual fire, which does both damage and healing and becomes a very useful spell once you obtain the slinger healing RMT rune set. I know that my only damage ability on my esper is Pyrokinetic Flame (a buff spell that attaches to an enemy, creates an aoe damage field around it, and also increases the assault power of those hitting the enemy) and if I feel like it, right clicking the mob. I might be able to do about 1-1.5k dps like this. Meanwhile comparably geared dps can pull upwards of 25-30k dps.

I wish you were wrong about your last paragraph. I hate their stance of draining all the challenge out of this game. I also disagree with the hypothetical that requiring healers to heal more instead of dpsing somehow makes it more difficult. IMO it just makes it more engaging. If I were playing Chloromancer or Discipline Priest, where dealing damage is a key component of my healing, then that would be one thing... but spamming one nuke and a dot spell does not equate to compelling gameplay.