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

[Ametrine]

The only time I'm just standing around is if things went so south I burned my mana on too many rezzes. A part of my job as a healer is to gauge whether I should rez a downed player or focus on keeping the remaining players up, or possibly rez someone else. It happens.

I'm with Snow Princess on most of her points. Healing in FXIV is tuned to let us DPS, but if you go SO HARD on damage dealing that you can't swap to heals when someone eats it, then you are doing it wrong. That's a sign you haven't learned to manage your resources.

You are supposed to always leave yourself a safety net of MP while going on with DPS, and all three healers have multible methods to regain MP AND turn up the burst heals if they need to hurry. It's just proper CD usage. Thus my opening note. I may need to wait for Swiftcast. I may want to focus on less dead party members. It goes so many ways.

But that constant judging of situations is what Snow Princess is alluding to and something that comes with, you guessed it, experience!

OP just sounds like he never got past the growing pains.

That and letting shit players get to you is never going to help you. You don't owe assholes anything, and if it's SO bad, just leave. Report. Move on.

[RichardButte]

So in the end I need ask this, why should healing be the thing that changes because of big skill gaps of DPS and tanks?

A fair question, with what I feel is a reasonable answer: because the way healing is structured is currently creates a massive chasm in the balancing of raid encounters in XIV.

And I don't say this JUST because of how fast they get cleared, but because of the devs' admission that healer DPS isn't being factored into raid balancing.

Unless they're outright lying about that (which I doubt they'd do), the difficulty curve of raid encounters is going to continue to plummet right at the point where everyone in the raid can dodge the avoidable damage, because right THERE is where the amount of healing healers need to do drops to bare minimum and they can instead turn all that extra mana into DPS.

This is why the developers have themselves in a catch-22: if they design raids with the idea that healers will be DPSing, healers in raids where people are still occasionally taking avoidable damage will suffer horribly. If they continue designing them without the expectation of healer DPS, groups that can avoid all of the avoidable damage will steamroll the encounter because they can meet the DPS checks THAT much quicker.

It all centers around how players take damage in raid encounters. Most damage is either AA to the tank, unavoidable AoE to the whole raid, or avoidable telegraphs.

I respect their decision to add a skill check in that some damage is avoidable, but the flipside of that is that groups who can avoid this damage can essentially trivialize DPS checks, which creates the aforementioned chasm.

[Penthea]

I respect their decision to add a skill check in that some damage is avoidable, but the flipside of that is that groups who can avoid this damage can essentially trivialize DPS checks, which creates the aforementioned chasm.

It's like you have forgotten unavoidable damage exists. There is plenty of it in the game. Avoiding telegraphs doesn't automatically trivialise healing.

[RichardButte]

It's a different system, which is why I keep saying to the OP that it's okay not to be good at healing in this game compared to healing in some other game.

The problem is that I'm way, WAY better at healing in this game than I have any right to be: when I heal, no one dies. I throw a regen on the tank, and I DPS, because I literally have nothing else to do because the game GIVES me nothing else to do.

I'm sorry if you're afraid that the developers might actually make healing in XIV challenging, but I rather have a challenge than be bored out of my skull. /shrug

It's like you have forgotten unavoidable damage exists. There is plenty of it in the game. Avoiding telegraphs doesn't automatically trivialise healing.

What portion of healing isn't trivialized by dodging telegraphs is trivialized by the fact that you can bring an entire raid to full in 2-3 GCDs.

[Penthea]

The problem is that I'm way, WAY better at healing in this game than I have any right to be: when I heal, no one dies. I throw a regen on the tank, and I DPS, because I literally have nothing else to do because the game GIVES me nothing else to do.

...are you complaining that you're too good for the game? lol?

[RichardButte]

...are you complaining that you're too good for the game? lol?

No, I'm complaining that healing is boring and easy, but what's his face there has this idea in his head that me wanting healing to be more challenging and engaging means I must suck at it.

[Penthea]

No, I'm complaining that healing is boring and easy, but what's his face there has this idea in his head that me wanting healing to be more challenging and engaging means I must suck at it.

What content are you doing? I doubt you're doing top end content with your claims that no one dies when you heal. Or do you mean to say no one dies when the whole team plays well?

[hydralus]

Well, long as they just make the savage raids more challenging and requiring healers to heal 90% of the time I don't see anything wrong with just putting out more raidwide damage. Long as they don't touch the rest of the game with it.

[Naunet]

But you can if you dps during healing downtime. Most healers go by ABC: always be casting. It's rare when all they can do is stand around.

There is zilch fun about spamming a hard-cast nuke and occasionally refreshing a DoT. That's what I do the vast majority of my time as a healer, and that feels horribly wrong.

It's like you have forgotten unavoidable damage exists. There is plenty of it in the game. Avoiding telegraphs doesn't automatically trivialise healing.

And the unavoidable damage generally comes in a single, large burst that is recovered from with one, maybe two casts of an AoE spell. Then you're back to being a healer in duty finder role selection only.

What content are you doing?

Other games manage to keep healing engaging regardless of content difficulty. We shouldn't have to do the very top content in order to access even slightly more involved healing.

[Penthea]

There is zilch fun about spamming a hard-cast nuke and occasionally refreshing a DoT. That's what I do the vast majority of my time as a healer, and that feels horribly wrong.

I agree healer dps can be dull but due to the nature of healing healers can't have strict or complex dps rotations. If they did then switching to healing could massively gimp their dps. I don't think anyone should expect healers to have a complex dps system anyway. If you want to play a class that has an interesting dps system...play a dps.