Thread for future suggestions and constructive criticism for healer job design.

[Anoin]

Healer Job Design Principles

1. Healer jobs should be fun to play.
   • This should be true for all content including raids, trials, dungeons, fates, quests(main/side/beast tribe), hunts etc.
   • Healer mains shouldn't feel like they have to level a dps or a tank just to enjoy certain types of leveling/ casual content aimed at Disciples of War and Magic.
2. Healers should never have to be more concerned about their damage dealing than about keeping the party alive.
3. The different healer jobs should all be balanced so that all 3 jobs are equally likely to be used in each type of content.

Issues with the Healer Role

1. Healer jobs are boring to use while doing weekly hunt marks/fates/quests etc. This is caused by:
   • The basic damage rotations of healers.
   • The low damage output of healers.
2. Newer players are intimidated by the responsibility of dealing damage while simultaneously keeping the party alive.
   • This might have to do with the players' control schemes or key bindings. Having to target/cycle between party members and enemies back to back might be a lot more difficult for some people than others.
   • The timings of burst phases in raids, and the durations of damage over time actions might make players feel like they have to be using offensive spells at very specific points in time.

Issues with Specific Healer Jobs

1. Astrologian's new card system(as seen in the media event footage) is very linear and uninteresting. There are less uses for the cards once drawn.
2. Many of Scholar's actions are used to heal the party in an inactive manner, such as Excogitation, Fey Union, the shielding "galvanize effect" and the fairy's automatic heals. This makes it seem like Scholar (in a party setting) is meant to create a time window where they don't have to heal actively so they can focus on dealing damage. This isn't a problem on it's own, however, the damage rotation has been simplified in Stormblood (and again in Shadowbringers) so now creating this "dps window" for oneself doesn't feel as rewarding.
3. Even though the White Mage job has very strong healing and damaging tools, players are worried the DPS players will prefer to party with the other healers since they have tools that can increase the damage output of DPS jobs.

[Anoin]

Suggestion #1: Ease of targeting

Aimed to fix: People not wanting to dps and heal at the same time.

Healers could have a trait, similar to tank mastery, that lets them use any of their offensive actions while only targeting party members. For example: "Healer Mastery: Whenever you try to use a targeted offensive action on a party member, it will be used on the targeted party member's current target.". This would allow newer players to play healer relatively easily by eliminating the need to use "Cycle through enemies" and "Cycle through alliance list" keys at the same time and allowing people to go through entire fights by only using "Cycle through alliance list" keys. With this change more people might feel more comfortable with having more offensive actions since they can use all of them while the party is targeted.

Suggestion #2: Astrologian's cards.

Aimed to fix: The lack of depth in Astrologian's card system.

Astrologian could have an action similar to Royal Road, but instead of changing the effect of the next card, it could just consume the current card and give the Astrologian a 30 second buff on the next healing spell they are going to use based on the seal of the card. Let's say they all affect Benefic 1 and 2, Helios and Aspected Helios. Solar seal could give Diurnal Sect effect to it(or increase it for Aspected Helios), Lunar seal could give a shield that stacks with other shields and the Celestial seal could increase the potency of the heal and make it instant(or free). This way, there would be more decision making involved in Astrologian's gameplay without increasing the variance in their raid damage utility.

[Jojoya]

Healer Job Design Principles
-snip-

What is fun to you may not be fun to me. Fun is subjective. They will never be able to create a healer job that is fun to everyone, especially when so many people have decided healing jobs should be designed around damage dealing and not healing.

True balance can never be achieved without making each class's abilities identical short of flavor tooltips and animations. Players are always going to strive to determine what is best to create a meta comp as if that's going to improve their chances more than learning to how to excel at playing their chosen job will.

Did this community learn nothing from the DRK who was part of the world first Ultimate kill at a time when DRK was being spit on by the meta community? A good to excellent player in the worst job is still going to outperform the bad to fair player in the best job.

Ignore the meta community "knowledge" and go with the player who can actually play their job with the skill needed for progression.

Of course healers aren't going to be as interesting in content that has little to no need for healers. If you want to be dealing damage that badly, then you shouldn't be using a healer job. Most hunt parties in the mega trains would prefer people using tank jobs for the enmity generation as it is.

It's not just new players that get intimidated by responsibility. Veteran players are likewise intimidated by it. That's not something that SE can fix - that's a personal issue.

A healer should never have to be more concerned about their damage dealing than about keeping the party alive. If the group is failing DPS checks, it's not the fault of the healers unless they are letting players die that could have been healed. It's the fault of the damage dealers. Stop blaming the healers for something that isn't their fault and maybe new players will be less intimidated by the responsibility that healers have and more intimidated by the responsibility they have as damage dealers to play at a competent level.

Stop obsessing over healer DPS. Damage is not the healer's job. The more you emphasize damage, the harder you're making it for SE to create the healer balance you claim you want because everyone is focused on the wrong metric.

While there is reason to be concerned about some of the design changes based on our current end game experience, we don't know how those changes will interact with level 80 end game design. I'd rather see informed changes being made over how things work out in practice than over theory about what things might be like based on content design that we know nothing about.

[Anoin]

What is fun to you may not be fun to me. Fun is subjective. They will never be able to create a healer job that is fun to everyone, especially when so many people have decided healing jobs should be designed around damage dealing and not healing.

Understandable, in that case please try to explain what you think is fun about healing, so that we can come to a mutual understanding. In my opinion, I do not like being an item or a tool that only exists to let others do the damage in a raid. I like having to assess risks and manage them, I feel satisfied when I deal damage not because I'm helping the party, but because I feel rewarded for making use of my time and resources to find a window where I can dps. I do not think healers should be designed around dealing damage of course, but having more tools to heal is unnecessary and no matter how low a healer's dps might be, so far in the game healer dps has been the main factor on dungeon clear times, which isn't going to change with the skills we saw from the media tour. Plus, so far, healers have been using 10% of their time to heal, and rest to dps. In order to increase that amount to, for example 60%, the damage output of the bosses would have to be increased by 500%, which would place more emphasis on healer gear rather than healer skill.

Anyway, I'm getting off topic. The principles were there to emphasize that, in my opinion, the player base shouldn't focus on one principle too hard to the point they ignore the others. The developer team cares about fun and balance in every job in the game obviously, whether you like it or not. It's just how they went about it doesn't end up carrying the principles in my opinion.

I don't care about "True Balance". That whole part you wrote about balance is irrelevant to this thread. People that want to dps as healers don't want it for the sake of being more desirable in raids, they want it for self fulfillment, and enjoyment of their job.

[Anoin]

It's not just new players that get intimidated by responsibility. Veteran players are likewise intimidated by it. That's not something that SE can fix - that's a personal issue.

This is an absurd claim. First of all, the "Veteran players are likewise intimidated by it." is simply false.
Secondly, "That's not something that SE can fix". Not only are the changes we see being made to healers proof that they identify this as a problem and are trying to fix it, you probably have this opinion if you have a shallow approach to game design. You don't have to change the healer actions around to try to fix this, you could work on UI or the healing system in general to alleviate this problem. Just as many or even more people get intimidated by having to heal in the first place. You can't keep simplifying jobs until no player has to put in the effort to get better at the job.

A healer should never have to be more concerned about their damage dealing than about keeping the party alive.

Fair enough, this is the kind of thing I want to see more of in this thread. This is your opinion and tells me a lot about what you think is enjoyable about healing and what isn't, I will add this to the list of principles in a bit.
That being said, Dps tools can be implemented to healers in a way that doesn't sacrifice healing, doesn't make players shy away from dps to a point where they feel like they are healing is bad or where they feel punished for healing instead of dealing dps. If healing and dealing damage at the same time is intimidating, dealing damage can be simplified and made easier so that people can get the satisfaction of deciding when they should do what.

The more you emphasize damage, the harder you're making it for SE to create the healer balance you claim you want because everyone is focused on the wrong metric.

Stop focusing away from dps to a point where healers get more and more redundant healing tools every expansion. You are making it harder for SE to create jobs that require skill or feel rewarding. Every healer has 10 million healing tools, so they are either going to use just enough healing, and do damage rest of the time anyway, or the content will require healers to use every single healing tool they have, In which case, an optimal cooldown rotation will be laid out by the community, and the thing that will end up separating healers that can clear content from those that can't will be gear.

[Anoin]

Suggestion
Importance of healer damage and timing.
Aimed to Fix: Healers feeling like they have to be deal damage at certain portions of the fight.

Healer damage can be changed to be unaffected by raid damage buffs and cooldowns like trick attack or battle litany. With this I would also suggest things like Chain Stratagem and Astrologian's Cards to be reworked to benefit the healer rather than the raid. This might be a naive suggestion regarding AST since it would change their job identity a lot. But there might be benefit in brainstorming about other ways to address this issue.