Idea to fix controversy about healer dps.

[Alrin]

Instead of giving buffs through damage spells i would like to see short time debuff spells introduced to healers. You dont need to heal? Throw some debuffs at them.

[Kurando]

Have no real issue with healers that DPS as long as they keep people alive and know what the priorities are, but I will humour the idea of what OP suggested.

How about there being a new cross role action (or tweak Cleric Stance), that allows healers to heal a very small amount to allies nearby the enemy they have attacked with an offensive spell. So you use Stone IV on Cactuar, and the residual energy of this disperses to the nearby tank restoring their HP. In order to avoid it being OP, the amount would be really small like 1-2% of damage is turned in to HP and the CD is around 120secs. It would also only work on impact so dots wouldn't be effected, you could still use Aero and the impact damage would heal but the ongoing dot wouldn't.

[Rox_Unlimited]

You can put as many buffs on the DPS spells as you like and you will still have players saying "I'm a healer not a buff DPS, I'd play BRD if I wanted to buff and do damage". The only way would be to make every spell like assize.

Lol reminds me of the story of the guy who would use assize but would run away from the enemies because he was adamant he learns shouldn’t do damage and had 0 DPS

[KisaiTenshi]

Well some say so, some say otherwise. Its propabily save to say its intended but not necessary for a healer to use his/her damage spells.

The issue is that as the content ages, healing becomes less demanding, thus the ability to DPS "for free" goes from "if I can" to "well nothing else I can do, so why not"

If there are two healers and two tanks in an instance, then the off-tank tends to switch to DPS unless the content is demanding enough to swap, but with a healer, the entire purpose of the second healer tends to be "revive the first healer if they 1hit-ko'd, else DPS" not "take over when the first healer runs out of MP" . We are still seeing situations in older content where both healers decide they should be trying to help DPS, and letting the tank die in the process. Likewise, situations where you get either two AST's, or one AST and one SCH and both of them keep overwriting each others shields, they're not paying attention.

Any time you encounter content where the boss essentially does nothing for 15 seconds, the healer has nothing to do, since casting any healing during this does nothing. There needs to be a reverse situation where only the healer paying attention can save the party, or the party wipes 100% of the time. There are some mechanics like this already, (where everyone has to stack) but the stakes need to be higher where you have to actually reflect the incoming damage, not absorb it.

If SE wants to add another type of character to the game, the should consider adding one that implicitly acts like a healer/tank as opposed to the red mage of dps/healer-capable. Basically a shield/deflection setup, where what kind of damage they can reflect or absorb is dependent on the shield mode (eg physical, magical) as a skill or barrier cast. eg "reflect physical attacks, absorb magical attacks" , "absorb physical attacks, reflect magical attacks", or "absorb physical and magical attacks", where in the DPS is a consequence of the shield mode's reflection.

eg:
Physical+Magical barrier, Absorbs 5% of incoming magical and physical damage, does not return it to target
Physical barrier, Absorbs 10% of incoming physical damage, and returns it to target (as a number, not a %), caps at players maximum HP
Magical barrier, Absorbs 10% of incoming magical damage, and returns it to target (as a number, not a %), caps at players maximum HP
Reflect only, Absorbs 0% of incoming magical and physical damage, reflects 15% (as a number, not a %) back to target, caps at players maximum HP

The barrier would follow the healer character (like a movable "Collective Unconscious" ), and lasts 18 secs or until any other non-shield action is cast, and then needs to be recast. Thus the healer has to be close to the action. Cancels effects of any other HoT shields cast by other players while players are inside the shield and takes precedence over other shields except Paladin's Passage of Arms .

Then you have "+ convert incoming damage to MP", "+convert incoming damage to HP", and "+convert incoming damage to TP" as a single overwriteable DoT which gives an effect closer to Assize on every tick.

Anyway, that's just a back-of-the-envelope idea. I'll be really disappointed if they add another tank or healer, and it's effectively just a re-skinned skillset of another job again. Because for the most part, AST started out with it's own unique bits, but as of SB, it's basically plays almost exactly the same as WHM until level 50 when you can then switch to Nocturnal sect. The cards are RNG, so you can't depend on them, they're just a bonus if you can manage to use them.

[Connor]

I agree that healers desperately need some sort of mechanics to play with during healing downtime (aka all the time), but the developers seem absolutely terrified of adding buffs/debuffs to the game, so it’s unlikely.
What’s more likely is that we’ll get even more dps spells in 5.0, because can’t be bored when you’re doing the exact same thing for 4 years if it becomes progressively shinier.

[Driskus]

The reality of things is people are still going to complain regardless. I've had parties complain because I was DPSing (safely) and parties that complain about lack of DPS because too many people were busy standing in the bad. Adding these buffs isn't going to help anything. Especially as WHM, trying to play efficiently is about the quickest way to get chewed out by randoms I can think of.

Too many people tend to panic when they see DPS spells and they're not at 100% HP full time. Most of the complaints tend to be against Holy spam though, especially in Fractal HM. I kind of "test the waters" at the start to see if the tank/DPS is going to stun things. If I don't see stuns after a couple big moves, I go into full on Holy spam from there on. I've gotten complaints for Holy spam in those cases, even though the others weren't even trying to stun anything.

Pretty much, no matter what you do, there's always going to be someone in DF who will throw a fit, whether its pro-DPS or anti-DPS.

[Risvertasashi]

I mean, the best way to fix the issue is to fix the healing end of healers so that you need to spend more time focused on it. With the amount of content that can be healed with 25% uptime, it's not surprising there is an issue.

Wouldn't work with FFXIV's design. It's all about that burst damage. Even in something like Coil Ultimate, where every hit AA or ability hits like a freight train, you have time to DPS.

[Ghishlain]

I mean, the best way to fix the issue is to fix the healing end of healers so that you need to spend more time focused on it. With the amount of content that can be healed with 25% uptime, it's not surprising there is an issue.

But yes, if we assume that healing will remain a part time job for healers and that we need something to fill the void, having DPS spells do something for your healing spells isn't a bad idea.

Just to add to Risvertasashi's comment as well, even if the healing requirements were increased to be a bit more intensive, healing requirements will never change and cap at a finite amount. As healer's become more geared, reaching that finite HPS requirement becomes easier and easier, thus allowing for more DPS uptime.

Increasing the healer requirement would only be a small stop gap at reducing total DPS unless it was raised to the point where a healer would have to be healing constantly, which would then result in a different issue - healer's not having enough resources to actually heal through a fight until geared up to a certain point and even then once they surpass that point, we'll probably start seeing DPS again.

There's no real easy solution to the current healer DPS paradigm because current content design doesn't allow for much healing flexibility.

[Risvertasashi]

Ghishlain's spot on as usual.

...All that being said, one reason I did like Eureka (chaining +6 mobs) is it made me feel like an actual healer again. It's a shame the content has no longevity. I wouldn't mind seeing damage ramped up similarly in regular dungeons, make me cast actual curatives more often... but I also know that will never happen due to the content's accessibility requirements.

[VanilleFang]

the entire purpose of the second healer tends to be "revive the first healer if they 1hit-ko'd, else DPS" not "take over when the first healer runs out of MP" . We are still seeing situations in older content where both healers decide they should be trying to help DPS, and letting the tank die in the process.

There is no such thing as a "main" healer or an "off" healer. Every healer has something to bring to different situations. If you think that the second healer should just DPS until they need to raise the other healer then I never want to play with you. Why wouldn't you just have a RDM or SMN if that was the case? Both healers should be dpsing and healing as much as needed. If the SCH casts Succor before an AoE the WHM might be able to get away with just using Assize to bring everyone to full. Or if the WHM is precasting Medica II the AST could just refrain from using any healing. Even if we're talking purely low level content (like Titan HM for example) both healers can heal different mechanics more effectively than the other. No healer should be relegated to 5th DPS.

Any healer who focuses solely on dpsing is a bad healer.