Why do so many statics seem to be missing healers? What can be done to solve this?

[RichardButte]

I'm in a static that can't find a second healer after the other one went to school, and we're considering poaching our friend whose own static has been, and people from several different statics have approached me.

There are really only a couple things I can think about: make leveling easier, make healers more appealing, and reduce choice constraints like the dread of doubling up.

Might have something to do with the fact that healers in XIV spend more time DPSing than healing.

It's a rude awakening when you leveled a class called "healer" but spend 90%+ of your time waiting for people to take damage so you can heal it instead of spending your time healing.

But this is entirely a problem with XIV's pacing, especially the rate at which players take damage and the rate at which healers can realistically heal that damage.

If you compare healer potency in XIV to that of other MMOs, it's kind of insane: one (non-emergency) heal in XIV can typically bring a tank to near full HP, and even AoE heals tend to be potent enough that 1-2 can bring an entire party from near dead to full.

By comparison, healers in other MMOs tend to have healing rotations, where they're constantly pressing buttons to heal up smaller portions of damage instead of waiting for a party member to lose 3/4ths of their HP before recovering most or all of it with a single spell.

Again, this all comes down to how damage is dealt in XIV, which is balanced around the 2.5 sec GCD which dictates that constant, regular damage would be impossible for healers to manage due to only being able to cast a healing spell once every 2.5 seconds.

The end result is that, while DPS and tanks both have rotations that keep them constantly engaged and interested in what's happening, healers just cycle through a few DPS spells while they wait for damage to happen, after which they quickly heal it up before returning to DPSing.

Healing is a total snooze prior to static raiding, and that's abysmal.

If you find you dislike healing and can't figure out why, it's because healers in XIV aren't so much healers but are more "mages that occasionally top the party off while DPSing".