Healing is now a state of permanent hatred.

[GrimGale]

It's not a popular opinion, but I think FFXIV healing is designed to make people who enjoy healing switch to DPS.

Who does FFXIV ShB healing appeal to? Who enjoys barely using their healing spells and spamming 1 button over long stretches of time?

SE wanted healers to be "conscious" apparently. To be mindful of their healer role but then, why did they make healing so unimportant?

[GhostXO]

I get angry and annoyed when playing healer a lot because the role is dumbed down so much that if I'm playing it, it's probably only for faster queues or for stella clusters or whatever they're called.

[ZeroFool]

The only time playing a healer feels rewarding is when you play it for the roulette bonus.

Even then, that fleeting feeling only comes the moment you grab the prize and leave the Lv.50 duty you spent 15 minutes pressing 3 different buttons in.

[BloodRubyXII]

Who does FFXIV ShB healing appeal to? Who enjoys barely using their healing spells and spamming 1 button over long stretches of time?

SE wanted healers to be "conscious" apparently. To be mindful of their healer role but then, why did they make healing so unimportant?

This right here, is why I don't play healer and when I do, I play Astrologian which has the most APM and stuff to do. This game has some of the best healing toolkits I've ever seen in an MMORPG, but often you don't get to use all of it often and sometimes when you do, you're sort of forcing it when you're probably fine without it, and inbetween all that all you're doing is spamming a single dps ability with a dot up. It's simply not an enjoyable way to play for long periods of time. Dungeons are sometimes more fun than raiding is as a healer and the 71-79 AST experience especially when it was relatively weak was by far the most fun I'd had levelling in SHB and way more fun than anything I did at 80 on a healer.

[Connor]

Healing in ffxiv definitely can be fun. But outside of doing a first-time run on new content, it very rarely actually is.

Others have said it better than me but we have ridiculously bloated healing toolkits, each one individually being enough to cover most damage. Speaking of which, damage output is generally quite low at its base, and just gets more infinitesimal as ilvls increase. Healing always has a clear winner for which spell/ability is the ‘meta healing spell’, like Afflatus and Assize / Indomitability and Lustrate / Essential Dignity and Celestial Opposition. And of course only one of that already small set of healing skills is an actual GCD spell, and it’s instant cast.

Then, as if to throw salt at the wound right after stabbing healers in the back, SE decides we don’t need DPS abilities either. So we have a very small list of actually worthwhile healing tools because everything else is noticeably less efficient (I mean, is there ever going to be a scenario where you’d use Physick instead of Lustrate? Probably not).

Ultimately, healers end up stuck with barely any healing to do, only one or two healing spells that they actually need to use, but only one DoT and one filler attack to use between the very rare heals.

If you ask me healers should be able to help out the party during downtime. It just makes sense to me with a trinity setup to have the tank defending the party, the DPS dealing damage, and the healer doing healing or support. I’m not even talking damage support like AST. I think healing would be really fun if we had spells like Protect and Stoneskin to temporarily reduce damage taken, or spells with indirect support features like the old Shadowflare and Slow, or Miasma and Heavy.

I just think that making healers just do all dps, deleting all GCD heals and leaving only a few oGCDs, wouldn’t really do anything to make it more fun. At the very most it’d just make the role feel even more redundant; I’d prefer if they reinforced the focus of the role as something different from tanks and dps

[GrimGale]

When you ask the veterans how do they keep motivated to heal and they reply "optimization" you know something is wrong with game design. How many times you can spam your single target spell at a boss during a 10 minute fiight. How many things can you avoid healing to maximize the amount of times you press 1.

While I am sure "optimization" can be fun since its a very technical proces and requires a lot of focus and dedication, the gameplay itself is as repetitive as it gets. To be honest, I wouldn't mind trying to Optimize my dps on a healer role if the dps mechanics weren't so mindumbingly boring, from the rotation itself to its animations.

[BloodRubyXII]

Healing in ffxiv definitely can be fun. But outside of doing a first-time run on new content, it very rarely actually is.

Others have said it better than me but we have ridiculously bloated healing toolkits, each one individually being enough to cover most damage. Speaking of which, damage output is generally quite low at its base, and just gets more infinitesimal as ilvls increase. Healing always has a clear winner for which spell/ability is the ‘meta healing spell’, like Afflatus and Assize / Indomitability and Lustrate / Essential Dignity and Celestial Opposition. And of course only one of that already small set of healing skills is an actual GCD spell, and it’s instant cast.

Agreed. You could quite comfortably never ever use Neutral Sect for example, but you just happen to have weaving room for it and it probably gets used for literally one asp helios and that's it.

[RoseyDevlin]

For me I enjoy healing a lot, the more chaos and death in the normal runs the more fun it is for me. I have been main AST healer since SB, I did dislike the card changes but I still like it since its the busiest healer out there. Not a huge fan of the boring dps rotation that I agree but otherwise I like having control in keeping the party alive.

I try to focus on high end content to keep me entertained as a healer since its mainly in there I could actually heal more and think more about when to use certain spells to not cause my party a wipe.

[Seoulstar]

I've never become angry while healing and I sure as hell never felt the need to get mad and yell at someone over a mistake. We're all human here, we all have made mistakes in this game.

[Cidel]

so thus my commendations are well-earned compliments.