Nobody Really Wants To Heal

[TaleraRistain]

Sylphie was kinda a thing in the Conjurer questline for this very reason, actually....she's pretty relatable, in how she sees our role as strictly healing.

People always misrepresent that.

Sylphie, like her mother, was using her own life force for her abilities. Since she wasn't calling on the elements like conjurers do, she only had the ability to heal. When she says that phrase she does in that tired meme that everyone brings out, that's what she means. She only wants to keep using the power she is familiar with. She doesn't want to tap into nature.

As to the OP, I want to heal. I've long been an advocate for making healing more necessary. And a healer focused on healing isn't dumbing down or the easy route. I've played much harder games than this like EverQuest where you would get laughed out of the raid if you were a cleric who wanted to use damage spells. My dwarf cleric friend was a celebrity for how he would fire up Yaulp and wade in for the miniscule damage it would do, but it was still a situation where people were amused by the concept.

And his job wasn't easy. He was busy in groups and he was busy in raids. He was a fantastic cleric and it's to his credit that he could do that. But mobs hit harder, hit more often, mana pools were more limited, and fights were much more randomized. He had plenty of do with just healing and buffing. I played a druid as my secondary and while druids could contribute more to damage (and were awesome quad kiting soloers) I was busy in groups healing and damage shielding and possibly sometimes snaring adds. So it is entirely possible to be a pure healer and be challenged. But there has to be a committed effort on the part of the game designer to clearly define roles and make sure their game supports that design. When they let things slip and blur like XIV has increasingly been doing, then we come to the issue now where healing is almost non-necessary.

[Adrestia]

/1 Renwynd >> #1 << casting Complete Healing. !! #2 !! You’re up in 1.8 seconds.

Healing in EverQuest was not hard. You cast one spell with a 10 second cast time, hit a macro to remind the next healer of their timing, and then sat down and waited for your number to come up again. All the “difficulty” was in getting enough clerics to raid and calculating how short you could make that delay so that each cleric had time to regen 400 mana before it was their turn again.

Druids would mainly nuke and throw out a patch heal if the tank took a flurry.

Raid healing was mostly handled by paladins casting AoE heals on cooldown. (And by bards playing the appropriate resist songs so that this was enough)

Shamans didn’t really heal. They cast their 75% slow, stat debuffed when it did something, and stacked up DoTs the rest of the time.

Eventually in PoP when CH was nerfed and Druid healing was substantially buffed, you were able to count Druids as part of your CH rotation so you didn’t need as many Clerics. Other than that, not much changed.

Also, once mounts became a thing and you could meditate while “standing” (sitting on your mount), the number of clerics needed for CH rotations dropped but you still had them in your guild, so they started passing time by nuking.

[kidalutz]

Its nobody's fault that the majority of players agree that if you only healed 100% of the time it would be boring AF. Instead of complaining, people should adapt. Fact of the matter is, pure healing is a relic of the past and it's better off that way. It wasn't fun only casting cure2 and 3 in ffxi, and it wasn't fun spamming only flash of light in wow, and it wouldn't be in this day and age either.

It's not a bad thing to be useful and do damage. I'd rather minmax than mindlessly heal up bars with nothing else to do.

I dont see the majority agreeing however I see maybe 50 people max agreeing and about 30 or so poking holes in thier arguments and maybe 10 to 20 more echo chambering one side or the other. 50 people and 50 people equals not even 1% of the playerbase. basically STAHP Saying The Majority the Majority obviously dont have a problem one way or another about it or they'd say something.

[Nedkel]

my experience with wow as healer is probably one of the worst i ever had in mmorpg.

found a party, when inside, still typing "hello" everyone just went on their way. like really on their own way, tank just charge ahead non stop, 1 DPS went to the left, the other 2 went to the right like wtf is going on? who should i follow?

i got left behind because everyone moving like their house is on fire, i was behind like 7 seconds and they start vote kick me out, loading screen, back to dungoen enterance.

seriously, wtf is happening lol. and i experience a similar stuff like that 3 times. delete the game, unsub it even though i still have 14 days left, back to FF14, never look other mmo again.

I had the exact same experience but as a tank.
They just rushed the dungeon before i was able to type anything. xD

Thats how "performance over fun" attitude does for a game i guess.

[Penthea]

People always misrepresent that.

Sylphie, like her mother, was using her own life force for her abilities. Since she wasn't calling on the elements like conjurers do, she only had the ability to heal. When she says that phrase she does in that tired meme that everyone brings out, that's what she means. She only wants to keep using the power she is familiar with. She doesn't want to tap into nature.

Sylphie wanted to be like her mother, who was loved and admired for her gift in healing. She wanted to emulate her by focusing on only healing and by healing in the same manner that she did (which we found out is what killed her mother). She later also didn't want to use offensive magic because she thought the elementals would be angered by it.

Players who use Sylphie as a representation of healers who are allergic to dps are twisting the cnj story-line to fit their narrative. She was against dpsing for what she believed were ethical reasons, and because she wanted to copy her mother. Not because she was against the idea of a healer having access to offensive abilities.

[EmoPanther]

I prefer only worrying about healing if I'm playing a healer. If i wanted to DPS i would play as my Dragoon. But unfortunately, I have to do damage as well sometimes to keep myself from falling asleep. Sometimes I let the Tank almost die, just to make things a little more interesting :/

[Knoahl]

Naturually gearing up, I want to be able to feel my gear power via various means as a healer... healing my tank to full with a barrier and being forced to afk until the barrier runs out hardly sounds engaging.

As ilvl increases healing becomes increasingly more trivial, and now dpsing when I'm geared from playing lots is going to make me feel extremly bored. FF just isn't hard enough or fast enough to encourage pure healing, especially as we gain power.

[Reinha]

my experience with wow as healer is probably one of the worst i ever had in mmorpg.

found a party, when inside, still typing "hello" everyone just went on their way. like really on their own way, tank just charge ahead non stop, 1 DPS went to the left, the other 2 went to the right like wtf is going on? who should i follow?

i got left behind because everyone moving like their house is on fire, i was behind like 7 seconds and they start vote kick me out, loading screen, back to dungoen enterance.

seriously, wtf is happening lol. and i experience a similar stuff like that 3 times. delete the game, unsub it even though i still have 14 days left, back to FF14, never look other mmo again.

The game is not very new player friendly even at low levels. I'd guess it's because there aren't many new players in a game that is shrinking, and because the game encourages alt characters so every lowbie is assumed to be one.

Dungeons begin from zoning in since there is no Protect to cast and no barrier ring holding the party still. You're meant to type on the move or not at all, place your heal on the tank (it won't give you aggro), put him on focus target and follow him everywhere. Ignore the dps unless they are smart enough to be in your range and stay close to the tank while he melts the dungeon with overpowered AoE. And pick the movement speed increasing talents. Go go go!

It's quite a different mentality compared to dungeon runs here.

[gumas]

The game is not very new player friendly even at low levels

this, and not just low level, for anyone who doing it "first time" is pretty much "catch up or kick" rule at this point. everyone even first timer is expected to know what to do, where to go, how to do, if you late or left behind by 7-10 seconds margin its almost guarantee you will be vote kick (especially if you are tank or healer).

and i like how when they vote kick, all of them didnt say any word. just initate vote, yes yes yes, loading screen you're out lol

[Singularity]

Its nobody's fault that the majority of players agree that if you only healed 100% of the time it would be boring AF. Instead of complaining, people should adapt. Fact of the matter is, pure healing is a relic of the past and it's better off that way. It wasn't fun only casting cure2 and 3 in ffxi, and it wasn't fun spamming only flash of light in wow, and it wouldn't be in this day and age either.

That's not an inherent problem with the idea of full-uptime healing though, that's a problem with the design of healing skills. You're right that it's not fun spamming one spell over and over again, but that's not because it's a heal. Take this cure-and-medica design skeleton we have and imagine it as a DPS job and you get a caster with "basic damage spell", "bigger damage spell", "AoE damage spell", "DoT", "AoE DoT" and "Ground-effect DoT", with none of them interacting with each other or the job's central theme in any way. That would be a really boring DPS.

If the healing skills fit together into some sort of rotation, unlocking or boosting each other such that you'd get significantly more healing or spend less MP from using your skills in an intelligent order, then full-uptime healing can be as engaging as full-uptime DPS. They've sort of barely touched on this idea with things like Freecure and Enhanced Benefic and Plenary Indulgence, but those designs are all awful (Plenary less so than the other two), being on spells you wouldn't want to use anyway and/or unreliable, and incoming damage isn't high enough in the current game to always make the proc useful.