The Healer Double Standard

[Typhoria]

One of the main problems is how the formula is always the same.

Boss hits tank. Boss does tank buster. Boss does unavoidable AoE. Repeat.
Avoidable AoE is sprinkled on the ground, acting almost as a death sentence.

Also, knockoff edge instant kill AoE is boring and extremely lazy.

There is very little persistent damage that has to be watched out for, everything that isn't avoidable is just a burst. Throw out some mechanics where a few players have to manage stacking DoTs.

There could be a mechanic that requires an add to be tanked by DPS that gives a debuff. When the add dies, the player with threat gets nuked, amplified by stacks. Requiring the off tank to pick up the add before it dies, but not too soon or the tank will get too many stacks and die.

[Acesfool]

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,

Actually the problem is that's your opinion of healing. Healing, on the surface, has never been overly complex in any game. But I'm fine with it in FFXIV and I couldn't care less about a complex dps rotation.

[TonberiScholar]

Healing would need to be drastically nerfed and lots of oGCD converted to GCD skills.

This gets thrown around a lot, but I think it'd actually work better if we did the opposite.

Hear me out:

oGCDs are gentler on reaction time requirements but also easier to constrain resource-wise because you can end up having one pool of resources for Healer-specific responsibilities (pool of available cooldowns/charges) and another for downtime responsibilities (MP).

Remove all the cast-time healing GCDs from the individual Healers (this will only be temporary for some, bear with me). So Physick, Adlo, Succor, Cure, Cure II, Medica, Medica II, Cure III, Benefic, Benefic II, Helios, Aspected Helios. Yank 'em all out (for now).

Give each Healer a Lustrate/Tetragrammaton/Essential Dignity equivalent with 3 charges on a 20s timer, very early on (like Cure-level now or so).

Give each Healer a way to do a low-intensity "upkeep" heal (something like Regen, Embrace or Diurnal Aspected Benefic. This'd also need to be early.

Tie the bare-minimum "expected" Healer responsibilities in Normal-mode content to oGCD healing, and constrain the charges/available cooldowns appropriately. So like on Scholar, instead of being able to spam Physick and Adlo on the GCD, you'd have like three charges of Lustrate on a 20s cooldown, your Aetherflow abilities (Indom/Excog/Sacred Soil) and your Fairy abilities (keep WD as-is, restore Embrace to be manually-targetable, make it stronger, give it like a 10s cooldown).

Then make Savage require more of your oGCD pool than you "have", at base.

Then take all the GCDs you just freed-up in combat and all the space in the Healer kits you freed-up and make genuine interactions per-Job with them. Either providing GCD heals, enabling you to have a chance/cooldown for "extra" charges/cooldown resets on your oGCDs or a mix of both, depending on the Job.

Add some cast-time GCD heals back to the Healers but make 'em important features of the Job, not just a thing they have because they have the thing.

Make some of them into oGCDs and keep some as-is (because variety helps but variety as part of a coherent kit is better).

So WHM'd get Cure, Cure II, Medica and possibly Cure III back. Make Medica II into an oGCD with a cooldown same as its duration.

SCH'd get one of either Succor or Adlo back, but the other should probably cost Aetherflow or have a cooldown (or both). Physick would be gone.

AST'd get Helios and Aspected Helios back. Benefic and Benefic II would be gone or worked into a revamped Card system.

If you need to, for leveling purposes, add Physick as a Healer Role action, but make it after the first three dungeons.

Teach people to heal with their oGCDs and their maintenance heal first and use their Job mechanic interactions from there.

Spitballing:

• White Mage: Keep the Lily system, make Cure I MP free, make Cure II proc a Lily. Lower the cooldown on Afflatus Misery to 60s, bump up its potency a bit (to be even with three Glares or so), change Lily Gen to be one every 20s. Let their Tetra recharge chance be on Cure or Glare. They'd be the "endless Healing" healer while also being the "compensated for GCD healing with Lilynuke" healer. So basically "like now but better".
• Scholar: Make whichever of the GCD heals they kept (either Adlo or Succor) lower the recharge of the Aetherflow action when a shield completely breaks. Make hitting a DoT'ed target with Broil have a chance to reset Embrace or Lustrate's cooldown. Give 'em back Shadowflare as an Aetherflow dump with a cooldown (and with the Slow returned).
• Astrologian: Cards need help. Put Draw on the GCD, make the action of playing a Card do a Benefic-level heal on the target in addition to whatever buffs they add to them. Add a thing where they select an enemy target with like a "DoT" and that enemy takes damage when they GCD-draw. Maybe make Minor Arcana have a chance to reset ED's cooldown or something. Buffing should be a bigger part of their actions.

Then, for Extreme/Savage/Ultimate, bump up the amount of needed oGCD heals beyond what you can cover with your "standard" allotment, so you have to use your Job mechanics/GCD-cast things to recharge them quicker.

We'd end up with a gentler difficulty curve (because reacting is, generally, easier than pre-planning) and more room to differentiate the Healers both thematically and mechanically, since most of the differentiation is in their GCDs but they're intended to handle "easy" healing with just oGCDs.

Bonus: If you have "intended" things to do with your GCDs that aren't overhealing, people can't complain about people not DPSing (as much) because Healing GCDs would be a mechanic thing instead of a thing you'd be a fool not to trade for DPS GCDs wherever possible.

Make the boring stuff boring but easy and put most of the in-game combat time into more-complicated but technically "optional" GCD mechanics.

[SweetPete]

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.

I agree with Connor.

If SE went and just gave all healers crazy dps spells/ rotations then people who play healers to mostly just heal and support will feel left out and upset because it will be like a green light telling them they need to dps 90% of the time. As Connor said there has to be some way to give each side what they want so everyone will feel happy and feel they are equally contributing to the party success. While having fun playing the role they love and enjoy. I personally don’t understand why SE won’t give healers more buff type abilities. The more newer healers might not feel comfy in dps and the more veteran healers who want to dps more or become more busy just in general then give us something to keep us busy. More healer type mechanics in dungeons, trials and raids. Significantly increasing damage the party takes more often, buffing the party in some way, maybe some channeling abilities that support the party or debuff the enemy or both. SE needs to give us more variety. I think Ast is a perfect example of busy. They don’t dps as much because they are playing with cards a lot. Although Ast has major issues with their kit I still enjoy how busy they are with their support kit.

[Rilifane]

-snip-

While I do like some of your ideas, for normal content or "easy healing", as you put it, it would change next to nothing and healers will remain green dps. A vast amount of players who don't want to be green dps aren't touching savage and don't want to.
Savage players are not the ones the devs are concerned about when it comes to bumping up complexity and difficulty because it's already known that they can and will always rise to the challenge.
It sure would be nice for savage players to have complex, engaging healing and dps mechanics with meaningful choices and risks involved.
But everyone else is left where they are now - and those people are and always will be the majority.

oGCD healing is more forgiving and easier to balance regarding resources but the problem stands, that any oGCD healing frees space for GCD dpsing and any GCD not spent on healing is a GCD you can and should be spending on dpsing. Which leaves us with green dps outside savage even if the changes you proposed are made.

Edit: but that said, I would appreciate a change in skill acquisiton so that oGCDs are learned at much lower levels and people learn to use them to their advantage sooner instead of basically overhauling the whole way they healed from 1-50 to 50+ when the oGCDs come in one after another.
Because as it is now it leaves us with healer thinking their casts are the baseline and oGCDs are solely for "oh shit" situations, so they never use them throughout the fight if the situation doesn't arise.
If oGCDs are the way to go, it shouldn't suddenly be dropped on your at at later levels. Even spreading them out some more would be nice, like changing the 40s WHM skill from Cure3 (which most people have long forgotten about by the time they reach content where they COULD use it) to DB. Or even ditch Fluid Aura and make DB the 15s class quest skill.

[TonberiScholar]

While I do like some of your ideas, for normal content or "easy healing", as you put it, it would change next to nothing and healers will remain green dps.

My hope would be that with the increased chance for Healer differentiation granted by this change that they'd be able to make a buffing/non-direct damage option (like the AST kludge I mentioned) more appealing, even if it's really just like a buffing "skin" on top of a GCD damage filler. With the whole "playing a Card both buffs a party member and damages an ally" thing.

In practice, it probably wouldn't work out that way, but it'd at least be closer to "able to accommodate both preferences" than what we have now, I think.

Party DPS is the universal MMO currency, and it always spends, but we can at least change the form that increased party DPS has, if not debasing the value of increased party DPS completely.

[Kabooa]

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.

I find your reasoning flawed.

I imagine you're going to get far more damage by hitting Broil than Ruin 2. There's not so much movement in Titania that Ruin 2 is your best option.

Aiming for maximum uptime is correct, but doing so at the expense of superior action choice is blatantly wrong.

There's a reason I never put scathe on my bar.

[LariaKirin]

Engaging Job gameplay is a type of "content" too, and it's one Healer players have been more and more removed from with each expansion.

Their solution to adding new things for Healers is simply to throw more redundant Green Sledgehammer buttons at us while taking away DPS options to make room for them.

They don't "get" how to make engaging Healer jobs because their vision of them is basically a glorified Trust system that exists to make the Jobs they actually put effort and resources into have better queue times.

That doesn't leave me hopeful for the "future".

Technically, everything is "content". So that's a nice and easy way to completely sidestep my point. Go clear Ghimlyt 40 times with any engaging job of your choosing, then tell me it's not a chore - the DPS players are not having fun in that content either.

I find it silly when you (and other people here) say developers don't "get" how to make engaging Healer jobs, as if you do. It's simply the case of you not liking the changes - they know what they're doing and they're doing it deliberately.

You posted a lengthy rework above and it's a clear example of you not "getting" it either, by your own standard. I understand it's not something you've thought about for weeks, but none of your suggestions fix anything or change anything fundamentally. Downtime will still exist in the same way as it does now. This:

Then make Savage require more of your oGCD pool than you "have", at base.

[...]

Then, for Extreme/Savage/Ultimate, bump up the amount of needed oGCD heals beyond what you can cover with your "standard" allotment, so you have to use your Job mechanics/GCD-cast things to recharge them quicker.

Can be done with what we have now. Your "standard" allotment has no clear definition and can't be a thing - because the amount of healing you need is variable depending on your party.

The content is designed to be fun for a few clears - it is simply not designed to be fun in your 100th run. Once you've learned the entire encounter, it's a chore. No job design will change this.

[Billythepancake]

Actually the problem is that's your opinion of healing. Healing, on the surface, has never been overly complex in any game. But I'm fine with it in FFXIV and I couldn't care less about a complex dps rotation.

Care to explain how its complex then? Just because I have a million healing tools doesnt make it complex, especially if I'm only having to use them sparingly. for casual play, sure, I doubt it matters, for the more casual players they just want to go through a dungeon and keep everyone alive, damn everything else, so they inevitably heal more than they should, which is fine, I have 0 problems with people playing the game that way, but then the people who enjoy getting the most out of their class and pushing themselves to be better and better at it, it's like we're punished for it, that's why we want more to do outside of healing, and the most logical and easy thing for them to implement is dps options because they're already in the game, they just need to give us access. But tbh, I'm fine with a different solution so long as its engaging, because healing alone is not.

[Acesfool]

Care to explain how its complex then? Just because I have a million healing tools doesnt make it complex, especially if I'm only having to use them sparingly. for casual play, sure, I doubt it matters, for the more casual players they just want to go through a dungeon and keep everyone alive, damn everything else, so they inevitably heal more than they should, which is fine, I have 0 problems with people playing the game that way, but then the people who enjoy getting the most out of their class and pushing themselves to be better and better at it, it's like we're punished for it, that's why we want more to do outside of healing, and the most logical and easy thing for them to implement is dps options because they're already in the game, they just need to give us access. But tbh, I'm fine with a different solution so long as its engaging, because healing alone is not.

Complex is relative. They could give us hundreds of abilities with dozens of possible rotations, and there will be people who think it isn't complex enough.