As a healer, I miss healing

[Dasya]

Healing in this game has become crazy easy. I stand around and throw rocks or holy bomb, stopping once and a while for raid-wide damage or a tank buster. Outside of a PUG run going bad, the amount of actual healing I do is minimal. I might as well just be a DPS class that can toss out the odd heal, or we get super powerful potions to heal ourselves with (a la Dragon Age Inquisition) instead.

Sure, a healer should always be striving to heal as little as possible, but lately this game has taken it to the extreme where you're not healing often because there's not much to heal in the first place.

Regens shouldn't be all that's needed to keep a tank alive. Shield mitigation shouldn't be ignored because Indom or Earthly Dominance can handle in the incoming damage. I could go on.

Now don't get me wrong, I like that I can DPS in FFXIV. I compare it a lot to other FF games, where your designated healer isn't always healing, but throwing out offensive spells, summons, or even just attacking.

With the supposed healer balance changes coming, I'm hoping I will be doing more than just tossing out a regen, and casting the odd oGCD.

I don't want to only heal (like healers did in EverQuest or vanilla WoW), but considering I am a healer, healing should be my priority, and right now this is not the case. Being a "Green DPS" has become more than just a meme.

[cicatriz313]

I mean, maybe it's time to play another mmo? I'm sure there's one where healers are more focused on healing. Years ago when I played wow healers were pretty solely into healing.

[Dasya]

I mean, maybe it's time to play another mmo? I'm sure there's one where healers are more focused on healing. Years ago when I played wow healers were pretty solely into healing.

As I stated in my post, "I do not want to always heal". As in, I think healing needs a bigger focus for healers than what it currently is.

Even in ARR, there was more healing going on than there is now. You used to DPS when you could fit it in and it was finding a balance between the two that became the challenge. But now outside of a few rare healer checks (especially with oGCD heals and how rare incoming damage actually does happen) it's just DPS all the time and toss out the odd oGDC heal.

[cicatriz313]

As I stated in my post, "I do not want to always heal".

Even in ARR, there was more healing going on than there is now. You used to DPS when you could fit it in and it was finding a balance between the two that became the challenge. But now outside of a few rare healer checks (especially with oGCD heals and how rare incoming damage actually does happen) it's just DPS all the time and toss out the odd oGDC heal.

Do you do content above extreme trials? From what I've seen healing tends to be pretty strategic in that you use your ogcds in the right spots and if you're not good at it you need to heal more. So I guess as skill goes up there's less healing but it's not necessarily how it always is for every healer. My point is more that I don't really see this paradigm of trying to get as much dps in as possible shifting. And it seems like the devs are shifting more and more to dps centric healing with the previous mind change and designing fights with less constant damage going out.

[Lilseph]

You'll find what you want in end-game content. Dungeons, outside of leveling dungeons, are a snorefest for healers.

[Dasya]

Do you do content above extreme trials? From what I've seen healing tends to be pretty strategic in that you use your ogcds in the right spots and if you're not good at it you need to heal more. So I guess as skill goes up there's less healing but it's not necessarily how it always is for every healer. My point is more that I don't really see this paradigm of trying to get as much dps in as possible shifting. And it seems like the devs are shifting more and more to dps centric healing with the previous mind change and designing fights with less constant damage going out.

I've missed participating in most of this raid tier (and the last) due to real life, but have been keeping an eye on things via Twitch and whatnot.

In general, the better people become at fights, the less healing will be needed (people stand in bad less often, gear improves, etc). And having the some fights where it's more about doing the dance than putting out raw numbers (Thordan, Lakshimi, Seiryu, etc) are fun as it adds variation!

I agree, we are shifting to a more DPS centric healing. I'm just hoping that shift doesn't keep going farther.

You'll find what you want in end-game content. Dungeons, outside of leveling dungeons, are a snorefest for healers.

Yeah maybe it is just not being able to get to the last couple raid tiers that have done it. I do wish dungeons were more challenging, though.

[Ogulbuk]

Sure, a healer should always be striving to heal as little as possible, but lately this game has taken it to the extreme where you're not healing often because there's not much to heal in the first place.

Group with my casual player noobness so I can jump-root more and stop fearing AoEs, I'll give you lots of healing to get done (^_^)

[Jojoya]

Healing always starts to feel more trivial toward the end of an expansion when players outgear the majority of the content they're doing. Faster things die, the less need there is for healing because less damage is being taken.

Then healers complain at the start of a new expansion about how healing suddenly got hard again because no one is outgearing the content anymore.

The cycle then repeats.

If you want the challenge to last throughout an entire expansion, find a group that will run content at minimum ilvl.

[Aellae]

With how much damage healers do nowadays (up to 90% with minimal heal input, ogcd spam) you'd think they come up with a healing-through-damage type of healer soon...

I am in the same boat and am not very engaged by the healing anymore in this game. Most of the time you basically see how much you can outdps the real dps while pressing an aoe heal once a minute and an ogcd somewhere in between. I enjoy healing, I enjoy challenges. And while some consider healing and dpsing at the same time a worthy enough challenge, it's not for me. I don't mind dpsing every now and then to not just idle, but I want the focus to be healing.

That said I won't unsub because we got no healer nor because am unhappy about the situation. What I will do is switch roles for the next expansion though.

Healing always starts to feel more trivial toward the end of an expansion when players outgear the majority of the content they're doing.

Except I can't remember any fight in SB where I was frightened and amazed at the same time because it was difficult to heal. As a healer I loved the Vault on release. It was annoying, it was difficult (didn't help I played AST) but it was satisfying when you managed to keep everyone alive. Throughout this expansion I mainly learned how to maximize my damage output by not healing, not how to overcome difficult encounters by using all my skills.

[Neophyte]

You'll find what you want in end-game content. Dungeons, outside of leveling dungeons, are a snorefest for healers.

It's not like you really need more than maybe 20 healing GCDs (and that's already playing it safe) for let's say Seiryu Ex or Chaos Savage.

The other 120 GCDs are Stones and Winds.