The Healer Double Standard

[Kabooa]

Yeah that's not how any healer or tank job in this game has ever worked, for both the focus has always been in maximising DPS while surviving content (with a minimal use of tank stance and healing).

Yeah. It's almost like that's a consistent problem with the class design in this game, because you alienate a fair amount of players who aren't interested in spreadsheets.

[Acesfool]

Yeah that's not how any healer or tank job in this game has ever worked, for both the focus has always been in maximising DPS while surviving content (with a minimal use of tank stance and healing).

Not sure what game you've been playing. I believe many of you are only looking at when players have completely out geared the content and therefore can focus more on dps.

[Taika]

It's almost like that's a consistent problem with the class design in this game, because you alienate a fair amount of players who aren't interested in spreadsheets.

There hasn't been a significant lack of healers before the current changes reducing the amount of their DPS abilities, though (admittedly, I do not know if the 'significant lack of healers' is factual or only my perspective of things, based on healers being the usual 'adventurer in need' in DF and pretty much everyone in my FC having stopped playing anything but WHM while all the healer jobs used to be popular within our community).


I'm not sure what do you mean by 'being interested in spreadsheets', would you like to elaborate on how the healer (and tank) playstyle in XIV reminds you of that? From my perspective, the ability to perfect your healing strategy to the point you are making a very significant contribution to your group's DPS is what actually drew me into healing in XIV, and I've been playing mostly healer mains since 1.0. From threads like What makes or made your healer job fun? you can read similar stories from other players, so I'm sure I'm not the only one who has very much appreciated the past healer design in XIV.

Not sure what game you've been playing. I believe many of you are only looking at when players have completely out geared the content and therefore can focus more on dps.

I have been healing this game since 1.0, back when healers were already DPSing everywhere from EXP parties (Natalan wolf farm!) to hardest endgame fights (ah the sweet Nael Deus Darnus Hard Mode). In Heavensward and Stormblood healers were my first level-cap jobs, in Shadowbringers PLD and SCH were my first level 80. I have tanked and healed all Shadowbringers EXP and level 80 dungeons 'undergeared' (I pretty much wore level 70 i400 stuff until level 77) with wall-to-wall pulls and there has not been any times when the healer (no matter if it's me or someone else when I'm tanking) hasn't been able to do respectable amounts of DPS.

[Billythepancake]

WHM is the only healer I play. When I play a healer I expect the complexity to be in healing. When tanking I expect the complexity to be in the defensive and protective abilities.

See, this argument would actually hold some water, if healing was complex in anyway. That's the problem, healing itself is not interesting or engaging enough on it's own, the current healers have so many healing tools that do so much you can spend almost the entire time not healing. If the game devs designed the game around healers healing more, having to consistantly use our healing tools to their maximum potential, and made the healing actually complex and fulfilling to do, I would agree 100% that the dps tools we have right now are fine, because I'd be too busy healing and using those tools to their maximum potential to notice my lack of dps tools. But that's not the case, if my tank is at 80% hp why would I heal them, if they're above half why would I heal them, I dont worry about their hp until they're at least at 40, I'm which case I'll throw on an excog and call it a day. Healers have always healed, and not to say I dont find healing fun, hell, if I wanted just a complex rotation I'd have mained monk or summoner, but healers found their complexity elsewhere in their tools, that made juggling those ON TOP OF heals much more fun. SCHs had their dps rotation and the risk vs reward factor of energy drain to keep them engaged. ASTs had their card systems, managing buffs, timing stars to keep them engaged. This is why people are upset, the things that made these healers engaging is gone, the heals alone are not enough to keep us engaged, the game is just not designed to be for pure healers, no matter how much the game devs want to push it.

[Hatstand]

Not sure what game you've been playing. I believe many of you are only looking at when players have completely out geared the content and therefore can focus more on dps.

It’s more pronounced when you’re outgeared, yes, but I do dungeons at my level and still have plenty of time to broil spam in boss fights. Also, why shouldn’t old content be under consideration when we consider design? Let’s just hypothetically say that in top end content you’ll have so little time to dps that you won’t care how mind numbing it is. Then you could just... ignore your damage options and heal. Giving more damage options will make old content better, solo content better, and those broil windows (which do exist at level) better. Conversely, removing them achieves nothing. It won’t even save you from people who think you should be dpsing. They’ll still expect it from you, even if it’s just a nuke spam.

[TonberiScholar]

If that's the case then why have the different roles to begin with?

To enable greater diversity in encounter design.

In theory, anyway.

DPS Roles are kind of the intended "starting point" of the encounter design. They cast the spells that make the peoples fall down or whatever, and usually get the "popular" character/class fantasies/aesthetics, and (seemingly), the lion's share of the design work.

Healers are there to enable them to make attacks in group-based content that would be non-survivable with only a soloing-focusing kit. Stuff like tankbusters, raid-wide damage and "avoidable" mechanics that are survivable but very dangerous if you don't avoid them. Without Healers you either need an active dodge system or everything needs to be survivable with solo-DPS levels of self-healing. Which puts you at something like PSO2 or early Guild Wars 2 levels of "zerg and stab to death" group content, which isn't very exciting for anyone involved. Healers add an element of counter-play to the boss's actions, and make it so that counter-play can't just be done by a soloing-level kit (because otherwise why not just bring 8 solo Jobs)?.

Tanks are there to provide a focal point/starting point for organization, because it's a lot harder to coordinate people to do anything when everyone has their own idea about how everyone should follow them. They also allow encounter design to include attacks that would kill your average soloing DPS but won't immediately kill someone with higher defenses/health, to make bosses seem more threatening. And they allow melee-specialized DPS to exist without having to run all over the place.

In short, Healers and Tanks give up some of their damaging output for either boss counter-play (on the part of Healers) or added survivability for specialized Tank-killers (on the part of Tanks). Enrages and DPS checks solely exist to make sure that they don't abandon the DPS roles along the way.

However, "healing unavoidable damage", "recovering from scripted damage", "recovering from avoidable mistakes" and "taking Tankbusters to the face" can't be tuned to take up 100% of your in-battle time. They'd either make content un-completable by all but the most skilled/coordinated/geared groups, or they'd end up being made so trivial that they lose the initial purpose and ability of the Healer/Tank roles in expanding on the basic solo gameplay formula.

Thus, downtime. For Healers, it's the time between healing bursts of unavoidable damage, healing mechanic-mistake avoidable damage and keeping people from dying to attrition. For Tanks, it's everything you do between surviving something that would kill someone who isn't a Tank.

Part of the solution to the downtime problem is to fill the time between required Healer-specific/Tank-specific responsibilities with more general mechanics that are addressable by anyone but may be targeted at either Tanks or Healers specifically or may be randomly targeted.

But a fight that consists solely of Heal-spamming or Defensive cooldown spamming interspersed with mechanics aimed at you/aimed in your general direction is exhausting and frustrating for most players, especially if it's coupled with the DPS checks that are necessary to ensure DPS roles even get a spot in the party.

So they have to ease up on both the Tank-specific and Healer-specific responsibilities (to not make the jobs impossible or trivialize them) while also not making every fight a Thordan-EX-level series of mechanics vomit.

Non-DPS-role DPS opportunities are where they fill that remaining gap. It allows Tanks and Healers to make up for DPS Jobs that are slacking (and they will, because they're typically the largest group of players, and the more apples you have, the more bad apples you're likely to have). and it allows (with proper play), the minimizing of the time/resources you need to respond to Tank/Healer-specific responsibilities.

The problem is that going too hard on the Tank/Healer-specific responsibilities makes content non-completable for the vast majority of players, especially in roles that are traditionally less common. And going too hard on the generalized mechanics also makes things too hard, for everyone. But going too light on them ends up making fights "too easy".

Other MMOs typically handle this by having the expected party composition change as Healers/Tanks get better at their role-specific responsibilities (through gearing or fight practice or increasing player skill or a lucky string of no mistakes or whatever). That's why, say, WoW will reduce the amount of Healers in a raid group and replace them with DPS specs or DPS Jobs once the Healing can be handled with less actual Healers.

This solution, while it works elsewhere, won't work here due to a design decision specific to FFXIV. The devs want a strict (by Role) party composition, meaning you aren't supposed to drop Tanks/Healers for DPS Roles when you can swing it. So Healers/Tanks need something to do to keep them "necessary" even when they aren't strictly "really" necessary.

So, as inane as it sounds, the Healer-specific/Tank-specific responsibilities are usually made to be handled by things that only Healers/Tanks can bring. And that, more specifically, you need a bare minimum number of Tanks/Healers to do. Stuff like Tank threat management (for Tank swaps or add phases) or alternating Healing-focused cooldowns to cover extended series of Tank or raid-wide damage.

What we end up with is having Healer/Tank gameplay being very cooldown-focused to cover those role-specific responsibilities, because requiring them to take GCDs greatly increases the chance for errors beyond what is recoverable, due to how the long the game's GCD is, how punishing dropping a GCD is and how easy it is to do so.

But a consequence of that is that we end up with fight designs that have a lot of non-Healing/non-Tanking "downtime" once you learn fights and not a lot of stuff to do in said downtime other than DPS.

That's where we get our current higher-end group-content paradigm from. And why "make Healers have to heal more" really isn't a solution, either, because the fight designs are built around having two Healers' worth of cooldowns (most of the time), and requiring Healers to be GCD-locked is too punishing for a lot of players to handle due to the ease of dropping GCDs relative to the GCD length and overall fight length.

The GCD doesn't change between "normal" and "savage" content, so "Normal'ifying" a Savage fight basically means taking out mechanics (which hits at either the Role-specific responsibilities or the general mechanic responsibilities). They can't (or at least they haven't shown) a well-tuned ability to remove mechanics but add GCD healing burdens to normal fights when they downtune them from Extreme/Savage, and I don't expect them to any time soon.

Now, the question I come to because of all of this:

Why does the thing we (Healers) do for the majority of our time in group-content combat (use damaging actions to contribute to group DPS) have to be boring, flat and one-dimensional?

It's not necessarily about the number of buttons. There are jobs in this game that have interesting DPS decisions to make with less actual buttons, and Jobs with more.

But our damaging GCDs are flat, boring and one-dimensional. Our Healing GCDs are flat, boring and one-dimensional. Our healing oGCDs are...okay, I guess, but they exist more for the purpose of enabling mechanics responses than they do as key pillars of the Healing kits (at least according to what seems to be SE's Healer design philosophy). In practice, it means that optimized players lean on oGCDs to trade Healing GCDs for damaging GCDs to get through fights faster, and that's at least marginally more interesting than sitting there waiting to react to damage with a GCD cast-time heal. But it's not "good", by any means.

We need Healer DPS kits that have interactions with the rest of the Healer toolkits, and we need GCD heals (where they have to exist) to be tied more into Job mechanics. Though, I guess before that, we need Job mechanics on Healers that are interesting enough to keep us busy in combat.

White Mage's ShB Lilies system/Afflatus Misery is a good start, but it's far from "enough", even for White Mage. And it's definitely not enough for SCH/AST.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk, etc.

[TonberiScholar]

Yeah. It's almost like that's a consistent problem with the class design in this game, because you alienate a fair amount of players who aren't interested in spreadsheets.

A GCD timer that goes red when you miss a GCD would do more to increase people's DPS in this game than a million spreadsheets' worth of calculations.

Riding the GCD is more important for DPS than literally everything else involved in optimization, by far.

You're arguing against the wrong thing if you don't like DPS-focused gameplay. You can, quite seriously, outdamage an entire party of Duty Finder people without using a proper rotation on a DPS Job so long as you hit your buttons as soon as they are available.

The "consistent problem with class design" is that dropping a GCD is so punishing relative to not doing so that it outweighs most other optimization. Even the things the game ostensibly "suggests" you focus more on (like doing a rotation that makes buttons light up or slotting materia).

For a practical example, in Titania EX, on Scholar, you can get more damage simply by spamming Ruin II every GCD than you can by using Broil on something like 70% of your openings.

You don't need to be a math nerd. You just need to spam your buttons like an ADHD monkey on speed and you'll outdo most people you run into. Hitting a button, as soon as you can, whenever you can, is more important than hitting the right button, 99% of the time. And that's non-intuitive, and it's part of why the game does such a bad job of teaching people how to play at a high level.

That causes different problems than what people think of when they think of the game being "too DPS focused", but it's the actual root of the problems most people complain about.

[Hatstand]

Snip

Bravo. Couldn’t have said it better

[Rilifane]

I've played a few different MMO's and healers never have a lot of dps options. Unless it's a healer who heals through dps, which I only remember one game with that, Rift. As soon as FFXIV began filling with former WoW players I was expecting this to happen. The meters (which I never use or look at) are all anyone cares about. Dungeon groups want to pull wall to wall and expect you to heal through it. Even if you do heal through it they'll complain that you didn't do enough dps. I play a healer or tank to heal or tank. I don't want to be a fake dps when playing those roles.

But that's how FFXIV is.
Not because players make it so or WoW players cried for it, it has always been part of the core design of FFXIV. The devs factor in a signifcant amount of both tank and healer dps when designing dps checks. You can like it or not but this hasn't changed since ARR and it likely never will. That is how Square Enix wants their players to play this game, that is how it's designed.
Healing is obscenely powerful compared to incoming damage even in content you don't outgear.
Many players cried for a nerf to Final Steps of Faith when it was fresh out and nobody was able to outgear it. But both my co-healer and I always found time to dps even though I played safe at first. Even if someone failed a mechanic, it was possible and even neccessary to safely pass dps checks.

Healing would need to be drastically nerfed and lots of oGCD converted to GCD skills. And you'd probably need more completely unpredictable damage flying around aswell. It needs a paperbag doing wall-to-wall pulls to force a healer to hardcast one heal after another. Or shire tanks in Doma and later.
But it didn't happen in any of the patches or expansions and even if the devs would be theoretically willing to fundamentally change that and have ideas how to go about it, I guess by now they're too afraid to take such a drastic step for fear of driving players away from healing.
Over time it became clear that they're afraid of driving people away with increased complexity of difficulty and by signicantly nerfing healing they would definitely put more stress and responsibilty on healers on top of the general complexity of this new healing.

[Connor]

Surely there must be some way both ‘DPS healers’ and ‘pure healers’ can both be happy? Does it really have be one or other?

I don’t know how but surely there must be some way to accommodate both or give people the some kind of option between which one they’d rather be? Ultimately this debate won’t settle if we have to choose one or the other, because ultimately only one half of the group is going to satisfied. It just doesn’t seem to right for one half to suffer for the other to be happy.