Encounter Design needs to be overhauled at a fundamental level

[Boa-Noah]

What they need to do is remove all dps spells from healers entirely and make the damage come from casting heals or off globals.

That's a very bad idea, back when the game first came out Healers had basically no DPS and were very hard to level up or play at all without being in group content, they had to change things to give healers DPS and even then had to further incentive people to play a Healer class with mounts and achievements. Same for Tanks though less so, they still had to implement draws so more people would play Tanks including those nifty mounts again.

Personally I don't want to go back to those days.

[AdamFyi]

Take living liquid in TEA for example, the damage the party takes during jagd dolls can vary depending on how fast players feed their doll and how much hp the doll had.

Eh, not really. It’s actually extremely scripted. Dolls are always fed at around the same time. They do fixed damage once under 24.9% and do not do less damage the further down you go. Higher HP thresholds just instantly wipes the group. The only variable is if a DPS randomly crits or direct hits which can potentially kill the doll accidentally.

Edit: Should clarify that I’m all for making fights more interesting, but needlessly spiking the skill floor for the sake of difficulty is a horrible idea.

[elioaiko]

While the current design of the encounters can be boring at time (especially as a healer main), I do find it a bit refreshing that FFXIV's fight design is consistent.

Changing it would be too jarring to most players and would need a massive overhaul to all the jobs' kits to adjust for it. Something that SE doesn't have the time or willingness to do. It's worked for them up to this point, why change it now? It might run people away from the game and that's not something they're gonna risk. They will always play it safe and they would also have to adjust every encounter to fit a more random damage pattern.

Also, adding more spikes for the sake of difficulty is not the way to go. Like someone said earlier, spamming GCD heals is simply not fun. GCD healer skills tend to be the most boring because they're either a regen, direct heal, or shield. oGCDs one's the unique ones that make it interesting to use (Earthly Star for example). WHM's new lily system is a step in the right direction as it rewards their healing with damage.

I'd say that healer design is a problem due to what SE wants them to be rather than how they actual are being used. Their kits do not interact with any of their dps kit which is the problem, you either spend your downtime dps (spam one spell) or do nothing.

[GrimGale]

SE should either embrace the green dps and give healers interesting things to do during healing downtime (I. E. Support stuff like Debuffing, buffing or outright nuking the enemy with an engaging rotation.) or making healing mechanics interesting.

Spamming Dps spell or spamming heal spell is equally boring.

[Ultimatecalibur]

While the current design of the encounters can be boring at time (especially as a healer main), I do find it a bit refreshing that FFXIV's fight design is consistent.

SE's designs have seriously changed starting towards the end of HW. Compare the damage patterns of the original 3 ARR Extreme fights (Garuda EX, Titan EX and Ifrit EX) with that of Ruby Weapon EX. You will see that all three original fights were nearly constantly putting out consistent amounts of high damage on the MT that potentially could empty a healer's mp if they relied too heavily on Cure 2/Adloquium spam while Ruby Weapon is mostly a dance that forces a tank swap with a debuff inflicting tankbuster that comes up only twice in the fight.

Random damage patterns is not what is being asked for. What is being asked for is damage patterns that actually test Tank and Healer ability more than once per minute.

Changing it would be too jarring to most players and would need a massive overhaul to all the jobs' kits to adjust for it. Something that SE doesn't have the time or willingness to do. It's worked for them up to this point, why change it now? It might run people away from the game and that's not something they're gonna risk. They will always play it safe and they would also have to adjust every encounter to fit a more random damage pattern.

I'm pretty certain most Healers currently do not know that White Mage started out with a proc based healing rotation (Cure proced free Cure 2 which proced half price Cure 3) that the original Lillies system would have worked fine with if StB content had needed the constant single target gcd healing it could output. Pretty much the only reason ogcd heals are mostly sufficient and healers can spam their dps abilities is because the damage pattern allows the ogcds to be mostly sufficient.

[Jandor]

That's a very bad idea, back when the game first came out Healers had basically no DPS and were very hard to level up or play at all without being in group content, they had to change things to give healers DPS and even then had to further incentive people to play a Healer class with mounts and achievements. Same for Tanks though less so, they still had to implement draws so more people would play Tanks including those nifty mounts again.

Personally I don't want to go back to those days.

The healer level 30 mount was because the game was new and Conjurer is the only healing class. People can spec into Scholar at level 30, but that's no good when nearly everyone is a fresh level 1 and the first duty is level 15.

Also, I'm pretty sure healers had more damage skills back in 2.0 compared to today. What they did have significantly less of though, is instant heals and huge amounts of healing oGCDs.
There was also cleric stance to complicate things, if you wanted to DPS you had to be fairly confident no healing would be required for the next 10+ seconds (can't remember exact cleric stance CD, long enough to make you sweat if you buggered up the timing though.)

[Volkaj]

My 2c on this, is that the fundamental issue is that tanking/healing have no skill depth for a given encounter.

There is no such thing as healing a fight better. You either heal it right and noone dies, or you fail the check and someone (raidwides: everyone) dies.
There is very rarely such thing as tanking a fight better. You either tank it right and live, or you fail and die to tankbuster/missed swap. [1]

Now this per se wouldn't be a problem if, as healer or tank, you never had any incentive to run old content or if you could dynamically adjust the difficulty (think ARR no-walls dungeons). But this is not the case.

So, as healer or tank you're faced with a very clear cap on how useful tanking/healing is in the party, and this cap also happens to be the skill floor for tanking/healing that fight. No room to optimize, except of course going the DPS route.

My favorite solution to this is the one I've seen employed in TERA.
On top of all DPS having positionals on everything (tank/boss positioning becomes very important), bosses have move sets that require constant dodging/blocking. Getting hit is not a one shot (or gives vuln stacks for that matter), but dodging/blocking everything is a solid DPS loss. So having a skilled healer (pure healer mind you) will absolutely boost party DPS by just healing off avoidable damage you can't always dodge.

Nice thing about this? If the healer is less skilled, as a tank or DPS you can just dodge/block more carefully.
It effectively creates skill levels in healing/tanking alone.

[1] Boss positioning for optimal melee uptime is a thing on some fights.

[Boa-Noah]

The healer level 30 mount was because the game was new and Conjurer is the only healing class. People can spec into Scholar at level 30, but that's no good when nearly everyone is a fresh level 1 and the first duty is level 15.

Also, I'm pretty sure healers had more damage skills back in 2.0 compared to today.

Well then my memory is wrong, I remember more than a few times that I'd come on the forums or see in-game chat from friends about how terrible being a healer was, I recall it being an absolute slog to get leveled up and a lot of people just straight up didn't want to level a healer because of it. Now I'm just wondering why the hell I remember that if Healers actually had DPS, it's probably because my friends were idiots now that I think about it, they did all jump servers and leave my ass behind so it's not that unlikely they weren't the brightest bulbs in the bunch.

[Shurrikhan]

Well then my memory is wrong, I remember more than a few times that I'd come on the forums or see in-game chat from friends about how terrible being a healer was, I recall it being an absolute slog to get leveled up and a lot of people just straight up didn't want to level a healer because of it. Now I'm just wondering why the hell I remember that if Healers actually had DPS, it's probably because my friends were idiots now that I think about it, they did all jump servers and leave my ass behind so it's not that unlikely they weren't the brightest bulbs in the bunch.

Even in ARR, CNJ->WHM had Stone*, Stone II, Aero I, Aero II, Fluid Aura, Cleric Stance, and later Holy as damage-related buttons. ACN/SCH had Ruin, Ruin II, Bio, Bio II, Miasma, Miasma II, Bane, Energy Drain, and Cleric Stance.

WHM now has Glare, Dia, Holy, Assize, and Afflatus Misery. SCH has Broil III, Biolysis, Art of War, and Energy Drain. In both cases, the level 50 kit was at least slightly larger. The level 60 kits were considerably larger.

Healers' relative damage, i.e. the percentage of a DPS's dps in a dummy fight, is relatively unchanged from back then.

[Zumi]

They could make it like other mmos where bosses do so much damage to the tanks and raid that healers do not have enough time to do anything but heal.