Is It Even Possible To Have A New Healer Job?

[Sebazy]

If the HoT healer brought other benefits that made it worthwhile (aka dps or group dps buffs) I suspect it'd actually be rather tasty for speed run and optimisation junkies TBH. Look at the %s around Whispering Dawn in the top speed run logs if you're unsure of the worth of decent HoTs in the end game.

Of course the difficult bit there is finding the balance between them being able to heal fast enough to be viable in raids (and not feel like a repeat of 3.0 AST) whilst not being too strong to the point where they can heal half of the more casual content out there by just hitting an aoe hot every 30 seconds and AFKing the rest of the time.

[VanilleFang]

I see issues with balance though. A job like that might be too good or terrible in a DPS meta. It all comes down to the rest of its kit. Just... having a huge focus on HoTs doesn't appeal to me personally I guess. I like having Regen and such on WHM but whatevers.

Still a melee healer would be awesome.

[SilentVoice]

if anything, i think new healer should have some elemental affinity skills. like mitigate fire\water\etc. damage depending on situation and boss. there is a concept of elemental damage and elemental resistance in this game, but very poorly executed, resulting in players diffirianting only physical and magical damage, while there is so much more in fact, just there are no tools at players disposal to make use of it

[Kacho_Nacho]

so we have to turn the HoT healer into a burst / shield healer to make him work?

Not at all, Tint. You just give them the option to burst heal in exchange for their HoTs. After the burst, the HoT healer would have to reapply all her spells again.

A HoT healer is a popular play style in WoW. But, with White Mages having multiple HoT spells already, I don't feel that Square Enix will introduce another healer who depends on HoT spells to FFXIV.

[Sebazy]

A HoT healer is a popular play style in WoW. But, with White Mages having multiple HoT spells already, I don't feel that Square Enix will introduce another healer who depends on HoT spells to FFXIV.

Yep agreed, I think we need an actual ground up alternative to SCH first. Diu AST and WHM are already very decently matched overall. Noct AST isn't as bad as it has been in the past, but it's still not quite there and I don't think SE will ever truly be able to balance it whilst keeping it's identity without a fairly comprehensive rework.

[Claire_Pendragon]

so we have to turn the HoT healer into a burst / shield healer to make him work?

A "HoT" healer would need to find ways to "Heal" in emergencies where chunks of HP drop suddenly, BUT through the means of their HoTs.
Thats the point of them being a "HoT" healer.

A WHM SCH and AST dont heal people back up quickly with HoTs, they only top them up.

Now, again, with the examples I gave, you can easily see how you can use a HoT to burst.
(Such as popping the HoTs currently active, which requires having had them up originally. Or maybe tripling their effect for a few seconds,a nd the last one, which i doubt SE would do, but speed up the tick rate and shorten the duration.)

I know your question was sarcastic, but does this help you understand the concept of making something focus on its theme, rather than saying something is a theme because it barely touches the idea?

Tanks have buffs to raise DPS for a short while, who needs a job dedicated to DPS, since this now makes them a full DPS

This is why WHM having a HoT doesnt make them a HoT healer.

RDM is the one of the least bursty DPS, yet it does have SOME burst, in order to help with situations where burst is needed. Its still not a MCH or SMN.

[Sylvain]

With the current raid design, a HoT healer would hardly work

Too many fight inflict damage in a bursty way and ask you to heal that damage rather quickly (Shin is a notably good exemple of a fight with double AoE burt)
Also, damage on tank (outside of burst) is rather negligible and could be healed by a fairy + WHM HoT alone


So either they overall stop making fight where you need to quickly heal the raid, or they rework healer strength in general and make AoE less potent and increase damage on tank by a significant amount (because this is what makes HoT hardly effective, WHM cureIII brings everyone up to 80% alone and is a 2sec cast and tank take barely enough damage to require a heal once every 15sec)
Another possibility would be to make more fight require double healers. For instance, HoT are rather good on Shin because both tank take damage the whole fight. If more fight were designed that way where both tanks constantly take significant damage HoT would become more valuable.


If they'd cut in half healing potency (for 5.0) and design fight in a way that makes HoT desirable on both raid and tank, then it would work. Basically, healing would need to be closer from WoW's healing design.


Regarding the dancer healing through damage, this is a tricky one because currently 2 healers passively bring damage, SCH and AST
WHM has to stop healing altogether to deal damage at the expense of mana (not that it is a problem considering they have unlimited mp),

If you make a healer that heals through damage, then either the damage has to be extremely low to not make it too good, but then if it is super low how do you make it do decent damage for when no heal is required (let say like when a WHM spend 90% of his casts doing stoneIV).
A stance could be used, but my feeling would make this a weird healer.
They'd need to be able to heal when there's no target to hit, and unlike WoW with disc priest, FF14 has notably a crap ton of transition phase where there's nothing to hit to heal. So they'd need to be able to properly heal without smashing the boss, so then you'd end up with a design issue, if the heal out of melee is as potent as the one in melee, how is this different then a regular healer standing in melee?


It's not that there's no possible heal design, there's plenty of things they can do (just look at WoW, they have 6 healing class), but they'd need to rework the way damage work in the game, because currently AoE quick heal and shields are king, and this is prevent a lot of original design.
No healer have channeling ability or walk over ability.
Very few healer use triggering mechanic (although this would arguably be a very SCH thing to have)

But honestly, i'm rather confident we'll see a change of healing design for 5.0 because the dev team has probably realised this is an issue long ago for both tank and heal. (in the case of tanks, since they take so little damage they don't need to increase their tankiness which makes tank and healer go all out dps, which is something that annoys Y.P a little)

[Claire_Pendragon]

With the current raid design, a HoT healer would hardly work

Too many fight inflict damage in a bursty way and ask you to heal that damage rather quickly

I dont even want to play a HoT healer, but with so many ppl not reading the counter arguments, but inserting made up excuses, I dont see a reason to continue with this.

Hate to break it to you guys, but none of the healers we have are "burst" healers.
Having a VERY minor amount of burst doesnt make them a "burst" class.
(Literally every healer is a small sustain GCD, with occasional oGCD "burst", which is no different from how a HoT healer is designed. If anything, the other healers need MORE burst, and less sustain, in order to play how a GCD healer should be playing, which is almost in SCH design, except that style was needed just to keep up with other healers, until they were fixed.)

[Sebazy]

Hate to break it to you guys, but none of the healers we have are "burst" healers.
Having a VERY minor amount of burst doesnt make them a "burst" class.
(Literally every healer is a small sustain GCD, with occasional oGCD "burst", which is no different from how a HoT healer is designed. If anything, the other healers need MORE burst, and less sustain, in order to play how a GCD healer should be playing, which is almost in SCH design, except that style was needed just to keep up with other healers, until they were fixed.)

Literally this.

Pulling up my FC's current quickest Shinryu EX kill, just over 50% of the total damage done is being healed by HoTs and the Fairy, a further ~30% comes from oGCDs with the last ~20% coming from direct GCD heals.

Whilst it's a highly extreme example, it shows how little burst and GCD healing is actually needed. In that run, Indom was the main culprit with there only being a single Cure III and Medica being cast.

I don't really consider FFXIV's healers to be true HoT healers as they don't have the depth of the likes of WoW's resto druid tbh. But there's no denying that HoTs are at the core of all 3 healers as things stand.

[Rilifane]

We don't have burst healers, no. We don't have hot healers either. But the damage pattern of most bosses is generally focused on burst dmg. The reason you can still let oGCDs and hots do most of your work is mainly that healers are extremely powerful compared to incoming damage and that the damage patterns are heavily scripted.
I'm not just speaking of WoW when I say that many skills you toss out without second thought are designed as some sort of long cd in other games.
If oGCDs & hots with the occasaional GCD is enough to keep everyone alive and safe there is not much room for complex mechanics, combos etc.
Once a bar is full, it's full. Period.