I thought Yoshi wants healer to focus on healing only..

[van_arn]

As long as healers have a single button that causes damage, you will be expected -- and by the playerbase, required -- to properly make use of it. Especially in Savage.

Yoship's opinion is secondary to this absolute.

[Connor]

Just want to say that in an ideal world we would have true options. A ‘pure’ healer-like Job that focuses on healing, a DPS job that’s a healer, and a buff/debuff bot style healer. That way everyone can play a healing ‘style’ that fits the type of playstyle they’d prefer.

I feel like this how they’ve tried to approach job design for White Mage, Scholar and Astrologian respectively. But honestly, right now they feel very similar to me. You use your shield pre-pull (Adloquium/Excogitation, Divine Benison, Aspected Benefic / Celestial Intersection). Tank pulls enemy and you precast your DPS filler so you can weave card/Stratagem/PoM for the DPS boosts, DoT, filler filler filler. If tank is taking damage use your ‘restore most hp to the target’ bubble (Earthly Star, Asylum, Sacred Soil). Then if things really hit the fan, you use your ours special oGCD heal to undo most of the damage (there are so many I won’t list them all, but they all serve the exact same purpose of directly restoring a large amount of the target’s HP, like Lustrate/Essential Dignity/Tetragrammaton) Obviously that’s a very reductionist view, but at the base there’s very little actual variation between healers. They all follow the rigid conveyor belt of ‘use shield, DPS, use oGCD if target takes damage’. The only real type of variation we have is Astrologian’s cards. They’re an actual mechanic that breaks up the monotony of this conveyor, by taking the user out of the standard personal DPS mindset and into one where our attention moves towards the party. And I think this is why the card adjustments have hit players so hard; one of the few things healers has to do that was truly unique to that job, and they made it so you can easily fit it into that conveyor belt where everything follows a set path.

Started off as a normal post and I’ve gone way overboard, but what I’m trying to say is that I feel like there isn’t much to make healers feel unique or ‘special’ in their own way. White Mage has lillies, which just give it more damage. Scholar has the fairy I guess, but in all honesty there isn’t much resource management required for Aetherflow anymore, because even if you have none you can still heal 90% of attacks with Succor (Emergency Tactics and Recitation), Fey Blessing and maybe Whispering Dawn if you want to give the White Mage a few more Glares. Astrologian had cards but now it just has a damage up button, which wouldn’t be so much of an issue if we didn’t have something better before.

Tl;dr there’s not much true difference between healer playstyles and what differences there were are just being removed. Which wouldn’t be an issue if we were given something to replace what we lost. I think ultimately more players would join the healing role if we had more choice in what kind of healer we play, instead of all three being the same ‘healer that predominantly uses oGCDs and provides personal DPS’

[Mistyregions]

Its interesting you mentioned wall to wall, that's also a problem in the game. It is not an intended mechanic, otherwise why not just have 60 enemies appear in one room. I think we need to wall off every single room, lower the potency and get back to basics.

[van_arn]

Its interesting you mentioned wall to wall, that's also a problem in the game. It is not an intended mechanic, otherwise why not just have 60 enemies appear in one room. I think we need to wall off every single room, lower the potency and get back to basics.

Aggro changes, removal of falloff, and a specific boss' design are clear indicators group fights are openly embraced, encouraged, and required by development.

Sorry, single pull party is over. You learn to deal with packs or u bad.

[Barraind]

Its interesting you mentioned wall to wall, that's also a problem in the game. It is not an intended mechanic, otherwise why not just have 60 enemies appear in one room. I think we need to wall off every single room, lower the potency and get back to basics.

Dungeons with locked doors every couple packs are awful. People should engage stuff based on their ability, not any arbitrary limits

[Rufalus]

I think the dev comments have probably been misconstrued a bit. We're extrapolating meaning from brief comments in translated interviews unless Yoshida gets on here to write an exhaustive forum post for clarity. My assumption is that they do expect healers to dps a bit - they even added the blood lily / misery mechanic to WHM this expansion - but they simply want to reduce emphasis on the dps side of healer kit which you see in the relatively few buttons it's afforded. Advanced players taking on Savage in the first week with no Phantasmagoria gear is a whole different thing; if he said he doesn't want players to feel pressure to dps, he's not necessarily including those people. Advanced players doing hardcore content are always expected to push themselves to the limit. For everyone else, in almost all of the content in the game, the healers have leeway to stand around not casting anything and it still lets the party clear. I don't agree with people slacking either but looking at it in this way you can't say the game design discourages it.

[ForteNightshade]

The challenge I think devs are facing here is that they want healer damage as an option, but not a requirement. The problem is that players make it a requirement to compensate for how bad their DPS is.

In some cases? Sure. In most, the expectation is there because why should healers have a built in excuse to do literally nothing? Assuming all is well, content simply doesn't hit hard enough to warrant full time healing. This means you will have excessive amounts of downtime. I cannot exactly fault six (or even seven) other people getting a touch salty while they do what they can to kill the boss. Meanwhile, the healer may as well be AFK because they have nothing to heal and they aren't DPSing. You'll often find people are less... agitated provided the healer is contributing in some capacity.

They could always just remove healer offensive spells to tell healers "hey we want you heal and only heal understand?"

Players: "but what about solo quests? We can't heal our enemies to death!"

SE: "That's why we gave you chocobos"

They could. They would also immediately reverse the decision when queues as a whole die because no one wants to touch healers anymore. I mean, look at how much backlash they got for Shadowbringers reducing the healer DPS kit. Forcing healers into a pure healer role when this game doesn't have the outgoing damage to support it would be moronic.

[HyoMinPark]

Or is Eden Savage an exception?

If you're trying to do early clears of Savage, healer DPS is absolutely mandatory. Parties simply aren't geared enough for you to sit around and not add damage, which you honestly shouldn't do anyways because this game doesn't enforce high healing uptime. The same goes for Ultimate, which Yoshida has expressly stated healer DPS is required for any who want to clear it.

That said, the statement about pure healing was in reference to non-shield healing. Not "healers should only heal". He has recently said that he knows players enjoy optimizing damage on healers, and that he doesn't think healers should never contribute to damage. The developer estimates for healer DPS are just generally low - not the 4,000~5,000+ damage they're currently doing.

The challenge I think devs are facing here is that they want healer damage as an option, but not a requirement. The problem is that players make it a requirement to compensate for how bad their DPS is.

This is incorrect. Healer DPS is seen as mandatory by the community because, otherwise, healers stand around for more than half of the content doing nothing. Even in the first two Ultimates, more than half of a healer's casts will be towards contributing damage, not healing. The outgoing damage in this game simply isn't high enough to warrant not DPSing on a healer, so the community expects healers to fill their copious amounts of downtime doing something productive instead of just standing around waiting for damage.

Not to mention, no other job is allowed to stand around doing nothing more than half the time. Personally, I don't think being a healer is a good enough excuse to support that stance. I think everyone should contribute equally towards a kill. Once healing requirements are satisfied, healers should contribute to damage just like everyone else is doing.

[Erza_Scarlets]

They should just add heal check for healers in party content. If your party isn't at X % of hp, your offensive spells are disabled unless you heal everyone to X %. Good healers will have no problems and will keep party up and have time to dps. Bad healers that just spam offensive spells till people die will fail.

[Urthdigger]

Just want to say that in an ideal world we would have true options. A ‘pure’ healer-like Job that focuses on healing, a DPS job that’s a healer, and a buff/debuff bot style healer. That way everyone can play a healing ‘style’ that fits the type of playstyle they’d prefer.

Small problem with that: Unless the other two healers are LITERALLY unable to put out enough healing to clear, why would anyone bring the job that can only heal and literally do absolutely nothing else?