What is imbalanced about the healers. I keep seeing this said everywhere.

[Gemina]

The way I see it, is balance comes from a few things. It comes from each job having established its own identity. Each of them have clear advantages over the other, but also have disadvantages that the other healers do not. This makes each healer unique, and they compliment one another when paired together. An example of this is SCH has powerful shields, but cannot apply a steady regen to the raid. They have Whispering dawn, but it is ogcd that can only be used when it is off of cooldown. WHM however can keep up Regen all day long, but does not have any shields outside of Divine Benison. However, DB is single target only and like SCH's WD, it is a ogcd that is only available when it is off cooldown. This is balanced. Put them together and one can shield the group while the other gives them heals over time (HoT). Again, this is just a small example.

Healers are currently unbalanced because of AST. WHM has no advantages over AST; it can do everything WHM can do, but can also buff the raid with their cards. On top of that, their DPS is also higher, has more mobility than WHM, and they can also shield the group if they happen to be paired up with a WHM. Sure, WHM can get the job done in all content, but why even have one there when you can have an AST? The end result is only one optimal healer composition, which is SCH/AST.

In order to balance our healers WHM needs to have a clear advantage over SCH and AST outside of a healing requirement. But the devs are adamant about keeping WHM a non-gimmick type of "pure healer", but this doesn't work and passive abilities like SoTL are negligible at best. So the devs are in this limbo-like state because if they rework and over-tune WHM and/or nerf one of the other two healers, all that is going to happen is it leapfrogs over AST or SCH in the optimal set up.

Some things they can do to give them this advantage is increase their DPS so SCH and AST can't compete, they can give them the ability the reduce enmity for DPS and themselves, reflect back damage that tanks take, or even give them the power to remove weakness from KOs and raise players w/o weakness. These are distinct advantages that doesn't involve healing, shields, or HoTs. We'll just have to see what they come up with though.

[Meta-Flare]

Thanks for all the clarification and info! Appreciate the civility.

[Dregenfox]

AST for the most part was an auto-include due to balance.

WHM used to be more of a 50/50 replacement for SCH as the 2nd healer slot due to their superiority in AOE healing. If a fight had heavy AOE damage, WHM made things easy as pie.

But people complained that SCH couldn't keep up with healing so they buffed SCH's healing. This indirectly let them DPS more as well. Then people started stacking crit gear and SCH's buffs + crit shields just became flat out better.

Can WHM still clear everything? Sure. But there's just no reason to bring one anymore, even for AOE heavy fights. There's nothing they do particularly well compared to SCH/AST.

[Lozza]

Some things they can do to give them this advantage is increase their DPS so SCH and AST can't compete, they can give them the ability the reduce enmity for DPS and themselves, reflect back damage that tanks take, or even give them the power to remove weakness from KOs and raise players w/o weakness. These are distinct advantages that doesn't involve healing, shields, or HoTs. We'll just have to see what they come up with though.

I raised some of these before SB launched and I'd love to see them, but after SB I feel that when SE says "oh whm is a pure healer" I feel they literally do mean that WHM shouldn't have any skill that isn't a pure heal, except for the two or three dps they need to get through solo quests.

[Sebazy]

TLDR version:

Underwhelming personal DPS which is further impacted by mobility woes and clipping issues.

Near 0 raid contribution through buffs.

Worst agro management, particularly with their opener.

Honestly, WHM really isn't in that bad of a spot for casual play IMHO, you only have to look at the Seiryu pug logs I've uploaded to see that it's generally easier to hit high numbers with erratic pugs on WHM than it is on AST, especially with a group that isn't helping things. A pug that kicks a WHM for not switching to AST isn't a likely pug worth joining (unless they are specifically aiming for speedkills and log runs). However I haven't seen anything like that in a while. It's primarily an image problem at the moment.

The fact that SE can't seem to see that fixing WHM isn't actually all that complicated is a bit alarming though. In my opinion, a decent GCD instant to help with mobility and clipping, coupled with some form of buff (Single target spell casting haste? Maybe even making PoM targetable and reducing the CD a bit to align better) would do wonders for the jobs image in group play without risking breaking the state of the game.

[Grimoire-M]

It's not just DPS that's the issue. It's WHM/AST just plain sucks as a healing pair. SCH gets a free on-demand regen that can be targeted on specific allies if you want to and also their pick of three extra cooldowns that do not require them to clip their GCD even when full casting. To put it in DPS terms WHM would have to sacrifice 1/8 to 1/7 of their GCDs solely to provide Regen to the main tank in order to compensate for the former and that still costs MP that could be spent on DPS. Star and Assize for most of this expansion lined up extremely weirdly in regards to AoE healing throughput too, forcing out more GCDs that could have been spent on DPS. The loss of Lustrate and Excog is also felt as those tools both come with additional value in prog when it comes to dealing with relatively minor positional mistakes.

The lack of mitigation on WHM in particular forces AST into Noct Stance more often than not which is just inefficient when it comes to passive healing further cementing the burden on WHM specifically to make up for the loss. The shields are nice but SCH would've been nicer. And between the two WHM would prefer to be DPSing in that pair if it could, but it simply cannot make up the difference a SCH would bring in terms of cooldowns and the flexibility to apply those cooldowns when needed. I would actually like to see WHM get some hard mitigation tool like a Protect Rework exclusive to them to specifically help out without being a shield.

If SE wants to balance it out the only realistic alternative option is to nerf SCH's DPS potential both directly and indirectly. Make Indom worse for AoE healing, either by increasing the Aetherflow cost and potency, increasing its cooldown, or reducing both its cooldown and potency such that it effectively has to spend more Aetherflow to get similar throughput anyways but can choose not to. Make Miasma II weaker as a single target option and boost its AoE contribution by making it care about how many targets are hit or letting the DoT portion stack up and have a lower duration so it's not worth weaving with. I would normally say nerf the fairy but that didn't work last time so the better option would be to improve WHM and AST's regen spells next expansion, specifically by allowing the single target versions to to last longer and maybe give them both a strong regen cooldown (AST) or spell (WHM) to match Fey Union.

The solutions to the healer balance issue that make the most sense to me beyond that basically focus on boosting WHM's hard DPS numbers higher and address their specific issues. I'd like to see WHM and AST both get a regen cooldown in some form, with AST getting the weak long regen and getting Aspected Benefic retuned into a strong but short regen while WHM gets a similar strong but short as a cooldown and a boost to the duration of their current Regen spell. This solves one of AST's issues and gives them both tools akin to Fey Union/Rouse Fairy healing that compliment one another.

Seeing the addition of Shell/Bravery/Faith in addition to the Protect rework would be nice as a way to round out WHM's lack of Raid DPS and mitigation altogether. I'm not as clear on how to go about it in terms of cooldowns, but they absolutely should be a thing. I'm sure they could interact with Lilies but that requires more Lily generation.

For AST specifically, enable temporary Sect Swapping via some cooldowns. One ET-style and the other as a Largesse replacement.

[Ilyrian]

If all healers can heal the content with no issue - WHM being the 'throughput' healer is completely meaningless.

[Hustensaft]

If SE wants to balance it out the only realistic alternative option is to nerf SCH's DPS potential both directly and indirectly. Make Indom worse for AoE healing, either by increasing the Aetherflow cost and potency, increasing its cooldown, or reducing both its cooldown and potency such that it effectively has to spend more Aetherflow to get similar throughput anyways but can choose not to. Make Miasma II weaker as a single target option and boost its AoE contribution by making it care about how many targets are hit or letting the DoT portion stack up and have a lower duration so it's not worth weaving with. I would normally say nerf the fairy but that didn't work last time so the better option would be to improve WHM and AST's regen spells next expansion, specifically by allowing the single target versions to to last longer and maybe give them both a strong regen cooldown (AST) or spell (WHM) to match Fey Union.

The general assumption here is that SCHs advantages are striclty

Imo it's more of an underlying design issue:

Damage in FFXIV is extremely scripted and predictable. Look at how damage taken is healed - it's primarily oGCD with preemptive Absorbs and the reminder is healed by HoTs ticking between mechanics. That works in nearly all healing scenarios in the game. There is never any need to really spam heals on a tank (as in multiple Adlos, Cure IIs, Benefic IIs) - if a tank ever needs heal outside of the oGCD instants, a single Heal-Type II takes care of it.

As a consequence healers spent up to 80% of their time in their primitive DPS rotation - every healer. Buffing or nerfing healing abilities also does very little in these scenarios, e.g. nerf Indom by 150 potency or Embrace, and whatever AoE HoT is ticking will just overheal less.

AST+SCH has a vastly superior oGCD healing setup - because WHMs oGCD heals pretty much mechanical garbage. Assize is DPS/Mana, it can't be used for healing. The holy ST trinity of benison, tetra and benediction is rather useless. Assylum is a HoT, so it's also unneeded, and Plenary Indulgence follows Medica II, it effectively negates the HoT portion if that spell. WHM has to cast the most heals in a game where you don't want to cast heals. WHM as a whole requires both healers to cast more heals, and DPS less.

Tuning healers via healing potency seems relatively impossible with how healing is done in this game. The only state you might get in is the pre AST 3.3 state where you didn't even meet the HPS requirement - and that is something that never should happen again.


Means you can tune healers.... via their damage...

AST has the highest raid DPS support and second place personal DPS.
SCH has the highest personal DPS and second place raid DPS support.
WHM has the lowest personal DPS (even though it has the highest potencies), might cause your healing partner to heal more, while it has no no raid support.

Even if you buff WHMs personal DPS, or add raid support (which has to be massive) - it has to make up for all the mechanical healing disadvantages taking a WHM brings.


TLR: Balancing Healers in FFXIV will never be possible as long as healers are balanced by their DPS - Healer DPS is a function of too many variables (encounter design, healing spells, oGCDs abilities, dps potencies, raid support)

[number473]

It's fine to talk about the problems with their damage, but let's not forget that their healing is actually broken. White Mage primarily works on a priority system which works something like this:
0) The fairy heals it
1) Use an oGCD
2) Get the Scholar to use their Aetherflow stacks
3) Use a regen
4) Use a GCD heal

You can see the problem, right? Lilies and Plenary Indulgence have requirements all the way down at 4 (lowest priority), but they are used up at 1 (highest priority). These mechanics actually promote bad habits in how you play the game.
It is even hard to get the required number of stacks to make full use of these skills if you are playing correctly. In a raid situation with a Scholar that can use Indom twice a minute, why would you ever need to cast 3 Medicas in such a short time? In any other content you don't need to heal close to that amount, you're looking at one to two aoe heals for the whole of a dungeon boss if you somehow managed to mess up your Assize timings. I don't know when last I had to use 3 Cures in a minute in a raid. In dungeons it's even less, where you're usually not looking at more than 1 Cure II per pull in expert roulette.

Let's assume you are even casting that many cures that you can take full advantage of the lily cooldown reduction. How much of a benefit do you actually get? For the sake of argument let's look at Tetra. The reduced cooldown will be 48 seconds. Assuming you use it on cooldown you gain 175 potency per second.
Let's be generous and say that you would have cast 1 Cure during the 48s cooldown anyway, so you are losing out on 2 Stone IV every 48s. This works out to a loss of 625 potency per minute. If you didn't actually need to cast any cures during that time this works out to 937.5 potency lost per minute.
I'll let you make up your own mind but it doesn't look like a very good deal to me.

Just for completeness, let's say you needed to cast 1 cure per minute and used the lily to cast Tetra. You gain a delicious 29.17 potency per minute.


The other problem is of course Assize. Here you have a skill that actually does too much - you want to save it to heal with, but at the same time you want to use it as quickly as possible to keep the damage and mana rolling. This is only exacerbated by the shortened cooldown. When the skill was introduced in HW it presented a choice of whether to use it out of cleric to heal or in cleric for damage, but as it is now, having your strongest nuke attached to a strong heal is just punitive when you have to delay using it.

[technole]

They could just resolve everything one easy sweep if they actually made healers, you know heal. It's gotten to the point where GCD healing is just a necessary evil.