Idea to fix controversy about healer dps.

[KDSilver]

You can like dpsing or not, facts are that healer dps because of there are reals bigs downtime, regen and healing in general being really powerfull.
The idea to finally fix this would be to create new and more entertaining healing mechanics.
Besides, giving extra healing to dpsing healer would dig a bigger gap between dpsing healer and none. That's not what we should be focusing on.

Shinryu EX heads was a good start, not the best idea in the world indeed, but I wish they could keep going with this.
Heal checks right now are "everyone's life drop to 1hp and then raid aoe after" "3 raids aoe" "you need to max hp for this" and that's pretty much all.

This is a bit sad and boring in a way...

[KisaiTenshi]

There is no such thing as a "main" healer or an "off" healer. Every healer has something to bring to different situations.
...
Any healer who focuses solely on dpsing is a bad healer.

Please don't take things out of context.

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"

And you're absolutely right, any healer focusing entirely on DPS is a bad healer, but POTD keeps training people to do this.

[MoroMurasaki]

OP I understand where you're coming from, I made a similar suggestion in a thread a while ago in General Discussion, but after a lot of consideration I came to an unfortunate conclusion.

Lazy healers that don't dps will still be lazy healers that don't dps even if dps would buff their healing output. They aren't avoiding a third of their kit in the name of efficency, they're doing it because they don't care enough about the time and effort of their party.

A really good healer is one that balances their healing and dps around what is most necessary at the time, making good use of cooldowns and oGCD skills to give their all for their party. I have a way to go to get there myself but I would bring up my o5s clear earlier tonight - boss at 3%, 3 dps die. A SMN is alive with tanks and healers. I hardly healed at the end there, we were approaching enrage. I didn't raise anyone I burned everything I had on killing that train.

I would have done the exact same thing even if my dps buffed my healing. It was the best choice for the party.

I don't think this debate will ever end because the anti-dps crusade will never see reason despite it being right in their face. I liked the ideas but I think this disagreement will persist throughout the life of this game.

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" .

This is just plain untrue. This is a rare outlook and healers that behave this way also care nothing for efficency. It's a straw man and has no place in this discussion.

Main and off healing more or less died with old Cleric Stance and I haven't seen anyone suggest it outside of a static enviroment in such a long time I forgot it was ever an issue.

[Llus]

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.

So why not make it so damage spells actually give buffs to healing spells?

Here is an example on WHM: If you have Aero-3 up on an enemy you gain a 2% healing buff if you have aero 3 and aero up you get an 5 % healing buff. Also stone, hitng and enemy with a stone spell reduced the MP cost of you next healing spell by 1% and this can stack up to 10 times and 10%.

Would that not be a good way to incentive players to use all their tools and helping to fix the issue?

Instead of buffing healing potencies by doing DPS, have a stacking 10% healing down DEBUFF for every heal which is only removable by casting a DPS spell. 1st cure, 100%, 2nd cure 90% .. 10th cure, 0%

[Risvertasashi]

Main and off healing more or less died with old Cleric Stance and I haven't seen anyone suggest it outside of a static enviroment in such a long time I forgot it was ever an issue.

Even static environments don't really do it anymore. If the "off" healer heals, it lets both healers DPS more and raises the total combined DPS.

[Tridus]

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.

Yes, but it doesn't have to start that way. There's not a lot of content that requires healing even half the time when it's brand new, let alone more than that. When you start there, it's not surprising you become a glorified DPSer very quickly.

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.

I don't consider having to manage resources and having people not cause unnecessary healing to be bad things. That's part of healing in most other MMOs. The fact that it's virtually impossible to run healers out of resources outside of Raise spam now is one of the problems with healing here.

There's a fairly wide gap between "once you outgear the fight you can add some DPS" and "when the fight is new you'll still be DPSing 2/3 of the time."

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

Agreed, it's a multi-faceted problem. But aside from content design, the healing design itself is part of the problem. MP restoration is too easy, and burst healing is far, far too powerful. I mean, part of the reason content becomes "blast everyone to 1 HP and then do AoE shortly afterward that requires everyone to be topped back up" is because healers can do that. Moderate damage is absolutely no threat whatsoever when a pair of healers can burst heal an entire raid back to full in seconds.

Heals are far, far too powerful relative to HP pools and incoming damage. There needs to be a rethink on how the whole healing model works for 5.0 because there's no real flexibility for the encounter designers to use right now. You can't run healers OOM and you can't threaten the group with less than massive damage. That leads to this whole "burst heal everyone back up and then toss more rocks" paradigm.

You'd get less healer DPS and less complaints about it if the "heal" part of "healer" was more work than it is now, which is exactly why this isn't such an issue in other games. Healers are busy healing and actually at risk of going OOM so they prioritize that and any DPS they can sneak in is a bonus for good play instead of the baseline.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

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.

To be fair, I doubt many want DPSing on healers removed entirely. There just needs to be a better balance. Presently, MP management is near null and void except for Astro, and all three will spend more time dealing damage than they ever will casting heals. FFXIV is among few games where your supposed healer will essentially be a poor man's DPS for upwards of 80% of most content. This lessens in say, God Kefka or Ultimate, but not to the extent it should.

Agreed, it's a multi-faceted problem. But aside from content design, the healing design itself is part of the problem. MP restoration is too easy, and burst healing is far, far too powerful. I mean, part of the reason content becomes "blast everyone to 1 HP and then do AoE shortly afterward that requires everyone to be topped back up" is because healers can do that. Moderate damage is absolutely no threat whatsoever when a pair of healers can burst heal an entire raid back to full in seconds.

Frankly, I believe this extents to tanks as well. It's among the reasons you spent 99% of any boss encounter in DPS stance regardless of whether you're tanking or not. There is simply little to no risk of lacking mitigation. And outside of some particularly nasty busters, most can be shrugged off with one CD. Tank invulnerabilities are used to trivialize mechanics which can make their inclusion all but pointless. A12S may be one of the worst offenders, where Holmgang was up for every single Punishing Heat except maybe one.

Between this and healers capable of restoring 1HP in mere seconds. It's scarcely a wonder why damage is prioritized over everything.

[Dzian]

I think the ABC mentality is the problem for a lot of players.

It often ends up feeling like your pressing buttons just for the sake of pressing buttons. And a lot of people just don't like that. it lacks substance and weight.

Hell even on dps jobs there's times where it'd be nice to not have anything to press for a few seconds stretch fingers let blood circulate. or even times where you have to do something different. but generally speaking your rotation is the same in every encounter you go in.. its really mundane and bland and just lacks weight. But then people already complain combat is too slow and they don't have enough buttons to press. And want shorter gcds.... crazy people

It's also been one of the complaints with eureka. The ABC for extended periods gets to be a right killer on the hands.

Healers are often seen as a slower paced class. It's not so much players don't want to dps.
It's just a class that can perform it's primary role without the need to be constantly mashing buttons for the sake of smashing buttons every second or 2. I've a few friends that play healers for that exact reason. the ABC is dull , boring and pretty dam stale.

mashing buttons for the sake of mashing buttons just isn't fun... and even on dps the rotations and stuff rarely change in any significant way. it's quite mindless and dull. and as I've said since beta lacks substance and weight.. its just flash bang sparkle.

can pretty much guarantee in patch 4.4 when I go into omega12 for example I could tell you what my jobs opener will be with a decent degree of accuracy. and what my general rotation will look like....

So yeah I think a lot of people choose healers just so they can slow the pace a fulfil there role while not mashing buttons endlessly

[Ghishlain]

-snip-

I agree with a healer redesign from a kit perspective, but they do have to be careful about how much they nerf the healer / tank kits. If they nerf it too hard then then we will run into necessitating gear before being able to clear content that would lead to 3-4 week clears that we saw in Gordias and Midas. I know not everyone will think that's bad but at the same time there those two raid cycles nearly buried the raiding scene six feet under as well.

I also feel the difficulty of the healer checks revolve around how mechanics are made too for Savage tier content. A failed mechanic is either a wipe / death, so there's nothing to "heal" per say. We either heal that raid buster or pick that person up off the ground with few things in between usually. More Prey type mechanics and more frequent tank buster mechanics (even shared to put emphasis on the myriad of mitigation tools available to a raid) would help out with that. Reverting MP tools to how they were in 3.X would also increase the challenge of resource management.

I wouldn't mind a higher healing check - I am generally an easy person to please in terms of content so if they kept content as it is or start tweaking to frequency of unavoidable damage, I'd find a way to work around it and enjoy myself. I'm one of those types of players who believe that a healer's primary function is maintaining party health but at the same time I understand that's an extremely low bar too if all a healer does is push green-healy buttons because that's how it feels healer's were design - huge heals at the press of a singular button. I've always felt healer's were designed to be "easy" in XIV as a means to encourage more casual players to try it out but that then leads to high-tier healers being bored out of their mind if they aren't using their DPS abilities.

Hopefully we see a change in content and healer design in 5.X to actually make raid healing more challenging from a "healer" perspective.

[MoroMurasaki]

Even static environments don't really do it anymore. If the "off" healer heals, it lets both healers DPS more and raises the total combined DPS.

I get what you're saying, I more just wanted to allow for that off chance that a static does do it. I know my FC has their WHM healing the vast majority of the fights and their SCH is more focused on DPS. I've even seen Sebazy mention in their group that they tend to perform the brunt of the healing to let their cohealer open up on dps.

Back in HW (in pugs) I had a policy on SCH that if I didn't see my cohealer flip on Cleric at all in the first 15-20 seconds of a fight I was going to let them heal and just pop out of Cleric for emergencies because one of us might as well be doing dps. I think this sort of attitude (though coming from a place of good intention for the group) is a reflection of the main heal/off heal that Kisai brings up. It's also one of the last times I ever thought about it as a serious thing. SB killed it dead.

But yes, clearly it's not optimal in the vast majority of situations. I just don't work with too many absolutes.

So yeah I think a lot of people choose healers just so they can slow the pace a fulfil there role while not mashing buttons endlessly

I mean... no offense intended here, but this is basically what I said. If you want to clear with less effort and more down time that is a polite way to word wanting a lazy clear.

People virtually universally expect tanks and dps to constantly be pressing buttons, healers are the only ones who are given this weird 'free pass' by some players to slack off.

The irony is that if healing requirements were raised to the level that healing is always required it would be the current "forum princess healers" who don't dps now that would suffer the most because they would have no chance of keeping up.