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

[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.

[SpiritMuse]

It's working for some people on the forums,

You could say the same thing the other way around - only some people on the forums are complaining, which would mean most people are totally fine with the way healing works currently. And I'd wager this is more true than the reverse, since the forums are skewed towards complaining. People who have no complaints generally don't speak out about the thing they have no complaints over, there's no reason to - they're just quietly enjoying the thing. If healing were really as problematic as you claim it is there would be 1. far fewer people playing healers and they would be limiting factor far more than tanks and 2. a huge outcry in the forums rather than just a couple of threads with lots of disagreement.

[Nalfein]

I like healer the way it is also Op quoting everyone in the thread won't prove your point. There's no need to fix things that ain't broken.

[MoroMurasaki]

I was going to comment on this further but the 3 people above me have said everything I could have said, thanks guys.

Plus if I had given any sort of thought out post it would only be fractionally responded to without any of my actual points addressed.

This thread can be summed up in what Nalfein just said; there's no need to fix things that ain't broken.

[Snow_Princess]

Yes, and these cases are less "extreme" than you might think.

The issues I'm describing aren't the type you'd face with static groups, but they're real and can happen often enough in the DF.

And ultimately, that's why I find healing too polarizing: generally speaking, you're either bored out of your skull with nothing to do but DPS, or someone in the group is ritualistically standing in the bad and you're going OOM from ressing them.

I'd like a middle ground, and I'd ideally prefer to spend more time healing.

And you don't even need to look outside of XIV to find fun and interesting class designs: even the DPS classes that stink on parsers have fun and engaging playstyles that always offer something to do.

If the healers in this game played on the same engagement level the DPS, I'd have no issue with healing.



It's not the biggest of my complaints, but yeah, leveling a healer without chain queuing dungeons is sluggish, to be sure (MSQ solo battles tend to draaaag with a healer as well).



I'm guessing that in SSavage they're finally just going to say, "Yes, healers will NEED to DPS. Please look forward to it." because they can't keep straddling the fence on this...

That is fine but you REALLY needed to word the thread better, that is why you got the replies as you did.

Also I do not static, and if you think it is bad now (even just at times) you should of tried being a new healer at late 2.0, that period was more abusive to healers then anything after it or anything I experienced in a MNO, it was sicking. SE addressed it by pulling huge mega pull blockers in DFs. It is also strange to me no one attempts those pulls during hw or even SB despite having more stats in those DFs then during 50 cap. (I do 50/60 roulette for when I have to do the 60-61 bridge, not ONCE did I see those pulls attempted)

This is where I think it is less of a game issue, if people are taking too much damage I speak up. I HATED!! having ast my first in SB in 67+ DFs esp if it was a **** war mass pulling and poping Deliverance in the middle of mass group. This is not a game issue and more of a habit issue of being too used of face rolling everything. Even then there was no MP ISSUE!!! it was more of a tank, .. or rather a DPS thinking they are a tank, taking more damage then I can heal even using all my CDs such as light speed and Essential Dignity. Sure I wish war and tanking be a bit more ... lowering skill gap proof .. and I did write a post long ago on such a thing. The only time you can legitimately run out of MP if you have 2 dps so bad while being able keep up a mp sink tank. If that is more what you are referring to, it is less a healing issue and more of "We should have better tutorials to lessen the skill gap" Because as much as SE wanted to attempt that with the new graphics, it did not succeed in that goal. You really need to get more experience and see what your talking about is a skill issue with tanks, a skill issue with proper rotations of dps, dodging bad or a combo of.

This is where knowing the game more comes into play. You keep leaving other factors out and blame healing problems only. JUST looking at healing problems, the only thing that truly exists is the burst nature.. DPS > burst heal > DPS > burst heal, but the thing is ALL HEALING JOBS have tools to deal with burst damage, divine Benson, Benediction, Tetragrammaton, Essential Dignity, Aspected Benefic, light-speed + x heal, swiftcast + x whatever, Lustrate, Indomitability, Dissipation, Excogitation, Aetherpact and a bit lesser extent, Sacred Soil, Assize, Asylum, Plenary Indulgence, and Earthly Star. For Earthly Star you can do unreal things with that, if you know the fights really well and know how time that. If you know something big is coming you got tools such as succor, noct-Aspected Helios, Collective Unconscious, Sacred Soil, Asylum, Excogitation, Aetherpact... (I think I got everything, and yes I am aware i repeated a few abilities for different uses)This is where the git gud aspect comes into play and learning when you may need to burst heal and knowing when you can dps. For example, some fights have big aoe burst > nothing to heal down time> this is a Emergency Tactics Succor/ medica II > dps > , or Aspected Helios. However something like A1N you might wanna keep Indomitability handy for the 1 hp drop, especially if you are being observant and do not trust your co healer. usually I Indomitability and succor and let the other healer do the rest and go back to DPSing. I guess you can say the fun comes from trying to take a challenge of having the most DPS uptime as you can as you use your different healing tools at the correct times to achieve such a goal.

The point is, your complaints here is more about being a better healer or having better skill for the average player, then healing it self (other then not liking the small healing > burst style) I find it hard to belive you are running out of mp with using all your CDs correctly, do you take Lucid Dreaming and Largesse for cross role? you can pair that up with Synastry and with noct aspect, your dropping a huge **** shield, meaning less heals being cast, more uptime on dps and less mp used.

[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.

[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.

[Freyt]

Everyone disagreeing with each other, both sides saying "no one disagrees with me!" Both sides saying "No one thinks like you do!"

The reality is left as if you don't know whether a group is going to do well or not, you cannot effectively plan around it. A DPS can simply DPS. A tank can simply tank. Both of these do their jobs simply by doing what they'd be doing regardless, but we can't exactly have healers just mass party healing simply by attacking.

To everyone bickering that your side of the argument is the correct side of the argument, you need to settle down and listen for a while. Understanding is the difference between listening and witnessing, and you all aren't doing it. (I mean some are, but don't just assume you are, take a step back and look at yourself you know)

Honestly I like the OP's ideas to fix this. Are they the right solutions? I'm not here to tell you that. What is being discussed here isn't about balance, or the healers role in a fight, but rather the endless debate between players about what a healer should be doing at any given time.