Healer identity in 5.0

[Felien]

^ Thank you, Gemina! You just succinctly phrased what I have been trying to say for 2 years. I have been playing MMOs since the original Everquest and I have never seen the "healer" role require healing less than 50% of the time. Sometimes in FFXIV, I am actively healing less than 25% of the time. If I want to play mostly DPS, I would just play DPS.

If we want a revolution in Healer identity, healers need to actively heal again. This oGCD and GCD split is madness. Our healers aren't healers. They are hybrids.

I don’t see it getting better on 5.0, now tanks will have 2 categories (OT and MT). So it will be probably less healing, specially for 2 healers. They could make the auto ataque deal a decent dmg so 1 healer will need to be on the duty to actually heal the tank between mechanics. But the other one will be a green dps till a mechanic.

[Brandedblade]

I'm really starting to suspect I'm one of the few people in this forum who actually likes the fact that healers in this game focus on trying to minimize their gcd healing and try to push out as much damage as possible. With that being said, I'm of the mind of WHM's getting better options for weaving and minor utility.

Personally I'd keep the core identities they already have the same, with minor adjustments.

WHM: High personal dps, minor raid utility (emphasis on defensive utility more then offensive) Solid emphasis on pure healing with limited shielding.

SCH: the healer who should be the middle ground. Moderate personal dps emphasized with sustain and damage over time., balanced raid utility. Higher emphasis on utilizing your pet to optimize your play.

AST: Low personal dps, High raid utility (more offensive oriented). Straightforward healing emphasizing mobility and buff manipulation but ultimately lacking compared to whm's output and sch's potential.

[Mimilu]

I'm really starting to suspect I'm one of the few people in this forum who actually likes the fact that healers in this game focus on trying to minimize their gcd healing and try to push out as much damage as possible.

I'm with you on this.
I love weaving oGCD heals in-between my DPS casts.
I don't know if I would want to main Healer anymore if it became more cast/gcd-heal focused... :B

[lordcruxis]

I'm with you on this.
I love weaving oGCD heals in-between my DPS casts.
I don't know if I would want to main Healer anymore if it became more cast/gcd-heal focused... :B

This just makes me wonder why you aren't playing an oGCD heavy damage dealer.

[Hustensaft]

Personally I'd keep the core identities they already have the same, with minor adjustments.

WHM: High personal dps, minor raid utility (emphasis on defensive utility more then offensive) Solid emphasis on pure healing with limited shielding.

SCH: the healer who should be the middle ground. Moderate personal dps emphasized with sustain and damage over time., balanced raid utility. Higher emphasis on utilizing your pet to optimize your play.

AST: Low personal dps, High raid utility (more offensive oriented). Straightforward healing emphasizing mobility and buff manipulation but ultimately lacking compared to whm's output and sch's potential.

That though is the idea behind the current healers, and it has not been working for two expansions.

You can never tune personal dps vs. raid dps vs. oGCD healing vs. casted healing vs. encounter design. That are just too many variables that interact with each other.
On paper, WHM has the highest personal DPS. On paper, WHM has the highest HPS. On paper, SCHs oGCD kit is balanced when looking at SCHs casted Kit.
When you add in encounter design, and only oGCD healing matters, then WHM drops out. As soon as you need HPS, you always take WHM, and that always has been done.

FFXIVs healer design is fundamentally flawed for various reasons:

1) Healing is a task that inherently only needs very little buttons. One target takes damage, you need a single target heal. More then one target takes damage, you might need an AoE heal. Damage intake is low or high, you can add efficient and weak vs. inefficient and strong heals. That's four buttons that cover most of the healing done. Then you can add in a single-target emergency heal, and an AoE emergency heal, and tank and raid defensive cooldown, and you're done. Healing is something that inherently only needs 8 buttons at most, anything past that is redundancy. If you have several emergency single-target heals off GCD, e.g. Divine Benison vs. Tetragrammaton vs. Benediction, then the casted heals are more and more pointless. That's the reason why in other MMOs (wether it's SWTOR, WoW, Wildstar or ESO), healers usually don't use more then 5 rotational buttons to heal, they are not needed. FFXIV healers though have 13+ buttons to heal, that's an absurd amount of redundancy, and is what ultimately caused the oGCD healing feast. Forced to add new buttons -> Healers can't only get DPS buttons -> add more healing buttons -> yay.

2) Encounters are massively scripted, and damage happens in spread intervals, and require overall very little healing. This essentially means that cooldown based oGCD abilities vastly outperform any sort of casted ability, esp. if their cooldown matches every mechanic thrown at you. That's why WD, Indom and DT are so good, they cover nearly all mechanics thrown at the raid. The rest that has to be healed is covered by the fairy. Your casted healing toolkit is 100% useless at this point, and oGCD healing that is not AoE (e.g. WHM 3 instant ST buttons) are rather useless as well.

3) Healers spend too much time DPSing. Your have, depending on class, a toolkit of 2-5 healing button that is absolutely useless, yet still has to be accounted for in balance. Your DPS is now a function of your oGCD healing capabilities. The on paper balance of the oGCD kit in comparison to the casted heal kit is pointless, as oGCD is vastly more valuable if you don't cast heals. You are now enjoying your 2-3 buttons DPS rotation. If Square would want to balance that, you could remove all casted healing abilities, move all oGCD heals into the Role Actions, and give every healer a full fledged DPS rotation. That's more enjoyable to play then 2-3 button rotation, and much easier to balance.

[Kalise]

I'm really starting to suspect I'm one of the few people in this forum who actually likes the fact that healers in this game focus on trying to minimize their gcd healing and try to push out as much damage as possible.

The issue becomes that in this game it's entirely possible (Also, entirely expected) that "Minimizing GCD healing" means "Never using a GCD heal".

Since, yes, all games will have a focus on healers trying to minimize GCD healing and maximizing GCD damage. But, as far as I've encountered, FFXIV is the only one that takes it to such an extreme wherein you may as well take GCD heals off your action bar they're that pointless (Outside of poop hitting the fan, or scrublord parties where people fail mechanics a bunch)

It's a similar thing to with Tanks where "Minimize time in Tank Stance/using Enmity abilities" means "Never using Tank Stance/Enmity abilities"

XIV just takes these concepts to the extreme, which can lead to some disappointing gameplay, because instead of actually working to maximize your DPS output... You instead just spam a very simple DPS rotation while tossing out oGCD's.

There's no balancing GCD usage, there's no skill in determining if you can get away with sneaking in an extra damage GCD or if it will backfire (Someone dies/enmity is lost before you would finish your next GCD usage)

There are no possible mechanics to utilize with these GCD's (Such as the Lily mechanic for WHM) there are no possible "Duality" mechanics where one type of GCD gets boosted by using another type (I.e. Using healing GCD's to boost damage GCD's and vice versa)

Essentially, by being so extreme in how it handles this design of "Maximize DPS" it actually just undermines the core mechanics in play and quite literally just turns Healers and Tanks into "Green/Blue DPS" whom merely have lower DPS numbers and slightly different styles of oGCD's to the actual DPS jobs.

Like, with the current design, you may as well just design every job to be a DPS with an oGCD White Wind skill. At least you'd then be able to focus 100% on making every job feel unique by having an interesting DPS rotation.

[Mimilu]

This just makes me wonder why you aren't playing an oGCD heavy damage dealer.

I do flip-flop between maining a healer or BRD, actually (I'm currently maining WHM after maining BRD for two patches, which before that I mained AST). >w>
I'm sure it's only going to get worse (not only for me but for others) once DNC comes out. >w>

For me, the idea of just standing around and not contributing to lowering the enemy's/enemies' HP is boring (especially considering the only way to clear a fight is to get said enemy's HP to 0).
Spamming DPS spells then healing a tank that just got tankbustered to below 50% with a oGCD heal just feels way more thrilling (and kind of empowering) to me. ♥

[LadyKairi]

I do flip-flop between maining a healer or BRD, actually (I'm currently maining WHM after maining BRD for two patches, which before that I mained AST). >w>
I'm sure it's only going to get worse (not only for me but for others) once DNC comes out. >w>

For me, the idea of just standing around and not contributing to lowering the enemy's/enemies' HP is boring (especially considering the only way to clear a fight is to get said enemy's HP to 0).
Spamming DPS spells then healing a tank that just got tankbustered to below 50% with a oGCD heal just feels way more thrilling (and kind of empowering) to me. ♥

I agree with this. With how content is designed, just healing is boring. Trying to pump out as much dps and buffs as I can while still keeping people alive is way more fun. I even tried playing healer in WoW recently, but I just couldn’t get into it. I like contributing more than just heals.

[Brandedblade]

To be honest, even in WoW and swtor I've found time to contribute some dps as healers, even if its only maintaining dots between my heals or the occasional aoe channel.

As for what I stated earlier. Something I stand strongly by is that I'd like to see WHM and AST given some level of the flexibility that sch possesses, for WHM that would mean allowing them more options to weave their oGCDs and finally giving them something they can pop on cooldown for boosting their groups dps.

Would more content where casting a Physick or Cure would be nessecary be nice? Sure, but even then I'm willing to bet people will still be trying to minimize their gcd healing even if damage got more demanding.

So overall I'm all for the way healing works now, I would just like to see WHM adjusted to it. Its biggest issue from my perspective is that its design contradicts how high level healing works in this game.

[Brandedblade]

As for the question of "Why dont I just play a gcd heavy dps instead"? I do on occasion, but I find that healers are the closest thing alot of modern mmos have to support classes. And with how hybrid the playstyle of healers are in this game, they manage to have that support feel better then even bards for me