Stop telling healers to go play dps

[Aylis]

As a healer I'm kinda neutral on the whole thing. On one hand it might separate those who do enjoy playing healers to those who just came in as one for faster que's. On the other hand adding in dps during down time was fun cos like. Standing around with a full MP bar and everyone was at full health just waiting for someone to take damage really wasn't fun. As long as I have at least SOMETHING extra to add in during those downtime moments, I'm okay with the changes as per the group side of things.

I think my only real concern is how much of a chore is it going to be to get through the majority of the solo bits in the MSQ going through it as a healer.

[Awha]

Specifically the bolded part, Dungeons are the perfect way around this. By incrementally increasing the healing requirements per dungeon you incrementally boost their ability to heal going forward.
It'd be hard to get the scales to balance properly, but if they did it correctly the result would be more Healers at level cap better able to deal with higher frequencies of damage.

Ironically, I think its the 'vets' that would struggle more with increased healing requirements. Evidenced by a video I saw from the media tour of an AST in the dungeon. Incoming damage was fairly consistent on the Tank, yet the Paladin was frequently dipping to 20%~ and even died on a small trash pull at one point.
So I rewatched it and paid attention to the cast bar and sure enough, The Tank was sub 50% hp with 7 mobs beating his face in and the Healer is happily spamming Gravity with no concern for the Tank that was about to kick the bucket.

Sure it is possible it to increase the amount of healing needed across the board, but as I said I simply do not have faith in SE to do so and at best they will up the damage enough to throw people for a loop for a little, but I do not see it being a lasting change with the standard formula SE has shown. IF SE does keep things the way they are then I honestly do think that people that enjoy healing in their current state then I do not think healers will be less common to a degree. Not because the healing output of the healers is gimped, but FFXIV style of healing differs so greatly from other games to a degree the style of play that we have had over the years caters to a more aggressive play style, if that changes then yeah they will alienate existing healers. The question is how many. Personally I wish SE went more into the aggressive healer aspect, but clearly they have a different vision. That is fine, just means that healers will not be for me coming 6.0.

I wish they upped their dps tool kit, finding a balance between the two aspects has always been fun.

[Gemina]

This is the problem with the current design of dungeons/bosses. Healers only really need to throw out cooldowns as it is.
Even if the damage in ShB dungeons is increased, healers are still going to be expected to DPS because they will still have downtime.

As it stands the game only requires healing in chunks, and the rest is downtime when the healer can do whatever they want. If the game was constantly throwing out damage, then that would be a different situation.

The idea is to reduce downtime, not eliminate it. I can't think of any healers who want to be healing for the entirety of the encounter, but I can think of several who don't want to be DPSing for 90% of it. We can talk about how healer DPS has been simplified, but the actual truth is this has only happened to SCH. They are the only ones who will be losing any kind of identity come 5.0. But what about the identity of the healer role itself?

For too long now all three healers have been a green DPS. When you literally do not use any GCDs whatsoever to accomplish the primary objective of your role, there's a problem. Healers are the only one with this problem. Healers in FFXIV are not healing jobs with offensive capability; they are DPS jobs with healing capability. If you want to be on board with the direction these devs want to go with healers, I'd strongly suggest to start planning on abandoning the concepts of the latter.

This doesn't mean that healers should not be casting offensive spells during their downtime, but the 90% DPS uptime is going away whether you like it or not.

[van_arn]

The healers that think they won't have to dps in shadowbringers are the epitome of naive.

[Dreamsoap]

I'm not personally invested heavily on whether healers become pure healing only or provide a trickle of dps, as long as there's no gaps that feel like you're left useless. That's the only thing I'm iffy about and it's just more "wait and see". It doesn't look wholly promising, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they might've changed encounters to compensate for the changes.

[Akonyl]

I haven't healed in XIV so I can't say for sure, but healers need *something* to reward them for actually healing well and getting new gear, and right now dps fills that role. If all you can do is heal, then when you start gearing up in savage after clearing the tier, what's the extra gear really get you? The ability to push less buttons and use more /dance emotes during the fight? With healer dps being worth something, more healing potency from gear means less time spent healing and more time spent dpsing, which is an overall benefit to the fight as you all kill it quicker.

I know that back in the day in WoW (dunno how it is recently) I played a healer and I'd just sit there spamming smite sometimes because I outgeared a fight and wanted to feel like I was doing something, even if healer dps was total trash.

Not to mention, having healers dps half the time means that healers who are worse can still compete in higher level content, because they can spend some of that dps time for healing instead. If you removed dps, you'd either have tons of downtime that'd make things a lot simpler/more boring, or you'd have damage cranked up higher in ways that'd just make it more difficult for the more casual crowd.

[Krojack]

Generally speaking, a healer should only have to heal a few times during a fight. Besides the tank taking auto-attack damage, tankbusters, and unavoidable AOE damage, people should.. I dunno.. not take mechanics to the face, and then blame the healer because they died.

Healers have a ton of downtime in this game, and it isn't asking much of them for them to contribute to the fight.

Healers should only have to heal a few times during a fight? Says who?

The reason you have this view if due to how FF14 fights are designed. Every fight is so scripted that once you remember the dance then healing turns into a minimal thing. This is a flaw in boss fight design. There is almost zero randomness.

I'm in the boat with the "healers should be healing and dps should be doing the dps". As a healer I shouldn't have to meld my gear to max out my DPS. This is poor design if you ask me. Even tanks meld to max out their damage.

[Awha]

The idea is to reduce downtime, not eliminate it. I can't think of any healers who want to be healing for the entirety of the encounter, but I can think of several who don't want to be DPSing for 90% of it. We can talk about how healer DPS has been simplified, but the actual truth is this has only happened to SCH. They are the only ones who will be losing any kind of identity come 5.0. But what about the identity of the healer role itself?

For too long now all three healers have been a green DPS. When you literally do not use any GCDs whatsoever to accomplish the primary objective of your role, there's a problem. Healers are the only one with this problem. Healers in FFXIV are not healing jobs with offensive capability; they are DPS jobs with healing capability. If you want to be on board with the direction these devs want to go with healers, I'd strongly suggest to start planning on abandoning the concepts of the latter.

This doesn't mean that healers should not be casting offensive spells during their downtime, but the 90% DPS uptime is going away whether you like it or not.

Think the general fear people have is SE is not going to make it so healing is that demanding and thus putting healers in the situation they are in now with far simpler dps tool kits. A happy medium is if they increased the amount of healing required while also expanding heir own damage potential.

[Callinon]

The healers that think they won't have to dps in shadowbringers are the epitome of naive.

I'd settle for doing less of it. Right now healers are doing about 90-95% dps and about 5-10% healing.. That's dumb. Play a dps.

If we could change that to even 50/50 or 60/40 healing to dps I'd feel a lot better about the role as a whole.

If you're a healer, your primary responsibility should be healing. If that isn't your primary responsibility, then that's a design failure.

Healers should only have to heal a few times during a fight? Says who?

The reason you have this view if due to how FF14 fights are designed. Every fight is so scripted that once you remember the dance then healing turns into a minimal thing. This is a flaw in boss fight design. There is almost zero randomness.

I'm in the boat with the "healers should be healing and dps should be doing the dps". As a healer I shouldn't have to meld my gear to max out my DPS. This is poor design if you ask me. Even tanks meld to max out their damage.

So bringing up scripted fights is interesting. I'd like to talk about WoW for a moment here without having the Sword of Damocles fall on my head if I could. The reason I want to talk about WoW is because it's the only other MMO that really has comparable or better raiding when put next to FFXIV.

I spent two expansions as a raid healer and one as a healer officer in that game and I'd like to talk about some differences in encounter design when it comes to healing. Bearing in mind I'm also talking about 25-man raids here so raids will have 5 or 6 healers in them.

Most fights in WoW are scripted. Most things are controlled by some combination of timers and boss health, so generally you know what's going to happen before it happens. Very few encounter mechanics in WoW were truly random, and even those could only manifest themselves in certain ways so eventually you'd know exactly what to do even when the random things did happen.

At no point was it necessary for my healers to dps. We didn't have the time. If at some point we DID have the time, we regenerated our mana pools and got ready for the next time we were going to be healing. Most of the time we'd be healing our asses off to repair unavoidable damage whether on the tanks or on the raid itself.

When people here talk about all this downtime where there's no healing to be done, I'm forced to ask "why?" Why isn't there healing to be done? It's not like it's difficult to design encounters that give healers something to do. WoW and other games have been doing it for decades. So why doesn't FFXIV give their healers something to do?

Like I said, it's a failure of encounter design if healers are finding themselves with THIS MUCH downtime that they can safely just burn mp on dealing damage, and I'd be perfectly happy to see an end to that. A healer should be making health bars go up, not down.

[Nyvara]

Healers heal, Tanks Tank, DPS cry about queue times. These are are the natural order of things. It seems like SE is just trying to get back to that.