Quote Originally Posted by Gemina View Post
What do you mean? Needing to hard cast cures is what actually feels enticing as a healer.
I'm not the person you asked, but for me the enticement of healing isn't the hard casting because anyone can play whack a mole on the green bars. It's using the whole class's package to best effect.

FFXIV does not have enough hard casting.

If healers are "forced" back into a lot of hard casting with a removal of ogcds, the game would feel really slow. Especially when every other role does a lot of weaving and juggling.

At least right now, AST and SCH feel like the other jobs in FFXIV in how 'busy' they stay. Not as busy as BRD or anything, but there's stuff do. Removing those would make it play like a completely different game.

A considerably higher ratio of direct healing would be great. Healing more would make me forget how mind numbing Malefic spam is. Sometimes.

But I suspect the way to accomplish this is less with class design and more with encounters. Even in savage modes, the mechanics are paced far enough apart that somebody has a cooldown that alleviates the need to direct heal. So we could see damage patterns that happen more frequently--less of those would be devastating, meaning that Star and Indom still shine for the big ones... but there's still a lot going on in between, and the only thing that's "up" will be Medica or Emergency Tactics + Succor.

Healer DPS is still the elephant in the room. So long as we have metrics, we will have optimization. We will have the push to heal "as little as possible". They could do like other MMOs, which is to make healer's damage output so awful that there's no point, but solo duties and open world play are already boring and long enough as it is. And even then, the community that plays higher end content is still going to say that pitiful stone spam is better than no stone spam.

I think to encourage more direct healing, tough encounters need to deal out low-grade damage at near-constant frequencies. Direct heals would need to heal for less against large HP pools, but also cost less MP to encourage near-constant casting. It sounds counter intuitive to healing more, but I want healer dps to be buffed--not Malefic and Stone and Broil per se, but all the dots and abilities, and maybe even give healers more ogcd/gated abilities. Then the healer DPS game becomes more about keeping up dots and using abilities in between heals, and there's a lot of room for identity development there. If Combust/Star/Lord/burst phase ability are the bulk of AST damage, the question "should I cast Malefic or top people off" won't always be answered "duh cast Malefic."

"Duh cast Malefic" isn't fun.

tl;dr I want more direct healing too! But I want to see it through encounter design instead of ability nerfs