Give your opinion on healer design!

[Vulcann]

Healers should be focused on healing while bring other things to the group like Buffs and Debuffs. their DPS should be marginal and only enough to get through solo questing.

#oldschool

[Morningstar1337]

It's alright so far, but I feel like we could use a few more offensive tools, A group AOE (and the return of Aero III to be replaced by a Light aspected version) and something to do during downtime (maybe a buff that heals nearby party members based on the damage?)

Would like to see Royal Road return for AST as well, and Divination buffed to avoid redundancy

Healers should be focused on healing while bring other things to the group like Buffs and Debuffs. their DPS should be marginal and only enough to get through solo questing.

#oldschool

A thing I noticed around this thread is complaints of what do do dueing downtime (read: when everyone is topped) and the sensible option would be to contribute to the DPS. the other alternative would be to increase group-wide and tankbuster damage so that healers don't have time to DPS, but seems antithetical to the current design at this point (especially considering the new healing oGCDs, of course it would be interesting to see fights like E7 where both tanks have to aggro separate bosses.).

Of course depening on what you mean by debuffs (my post assumes you mean ailments in general like Heavy, Slow, Silence, Knockback etc), it doens't help that they were phased out over the game's lifetime bar stat reductions, Stun and DoTs, the latter feeds back into the Healer DPS thing.

[Allegor]

Healers should be focused on healing while bring other things to the group like Buffs and Debuffs. their DPS should be marginal and only enough to get through solo questing.

#oldschool

See, that works in games like WoW where as a healer you barely have enough time to throw a Holy Fire in between heals. In XIV, however, chances are that unless someone messes up or an unavoidable AoE happens, there's no damage to be healed.

[Vitreus]

Everything I've wanted to say has been said by other players already so I'll answer this one.

- what gimmick or gameplay style would you give each of the healers? Both in terms of how the healing itself would work and what to do during healing downtime
I would make MP management fall on the healers, have jobs slowly run out of MP instead of being able to fight forever in combat. The healers would have separate abilities that would be used to restore MP like that do HP i.e. restoring over times, aoe, etc. MP restoration would be the secondary focus of healers when healing doesn't need to be done. They need to make sure people don't go OOM. You could make these abilities not castable on themselves so mana management is still something they need to handle on themselves. And in raids healers would be responsible for restoring their partner healer's MP. And simply make non-MP jobs like samurai etc. use MP the way they used to use TP.

The devs seem adamant that they no longer want healers to be doing damage during their downtime. Well this could be their new role in their downtime. You could even let them cast buffs on other players that temporarily increase MP consumption but increase damage done with that. I.e. the next X spells do 110% damage but consume 200% mana. That way we always have things to do when we don't need to be healing.

[tinythinker]

The devs seem adamant that they no longer want healers to be doing damage during their downtime.

They are not adamant about healers not doing damage when not healing. They just don't want healer damage to be required for clearing content (assuming appropriate gear and very solid play by other roles), or for healers to turn into green DPS. Just because content technically can be cleared without healer damage doesn't make it easy or preferable to do so. And that isn't remotely close to SE being resolutely opposed to healers casting damage spells in group content. As always, healers can help significantly in dungeon DF groups with their extra damage, especially on large pulls, and help close clears on raid bosses with single target damage.

[Morningstar1337]

Plus if they didn't wanter healers to DPS, they wouldn't have given them spells for the job (and design the overworld content around damageregardless of role), let along made them usable and scale them for group content beyond Haukke Manor.

[Recon1o6]

Unfortunately, that appears to be a front as they have not changed the healing requirements nor the dps requirements during the fights to exclude healer dps.
and even if that was the case, it doesn't explain why the rest of the game got shafted because of it for healers

That being said, a clue to the terrible job levelling appeared in the live letter yesterday- they only focus on how jobs play in new content and dont think about older content. Certainly explains the extreme boredom in 50-70 content

[Vitreus]

They are not adamant about healers not doing damage when not healing. They just don't want healer damage to be required for clearing content (assuming appropriate gear and very solid play by other roles), or for healers to turn into green DPS. Just because content technically can be cleared without healer damage doesn't make it easy or preferable to do so. And that isn't remotely close to SE being resolutely opposed to healers casting damage spells in group content. As always, healers can help significantly in dungeon DF groups with their extra damage, especially on large pulls, and help close clears on raid bosses with single target damage.

I must have misheard or misunderstood something then. But if that's true that they didn't want healers not to do damage and just wanted us not to rely on the damage in raids, why not nerf potency instead of remove abilities? Because the latter really seems to be a job design philosophy change instead.

[tinythinker]

I must have misheard or misunderstood something then. But if that's true that they didn't want healers not to do damage and just wanted us not to rely on the damage in raids, why not nerf potency instead of remove abilities? Because the latter really seems to be a job design philosophy change instead.

I agree, but maybe they though it was too tempting having so many DPS abilities? Or that weak spells would feel bad? I'd like to know, too.

[AnotherPerson]

I must have misheard or misunderstood something then. But if that's true that they didn't want healers not to do damage and just wanted us not to rely on the damage in raids, why not nerf potency instead of remove abilities? Because the latter really seems to be a job design philosophy change instead.

If you nerf healer potencies, people who play as a healer main will complain for a nerf for the sake of nerfing because it equates to having more buttons to press to do the same amount of work. if you remove abilities, you essentially took a part of the rotation and became unfun. Either way, it's a lose-lose. Rather than thinking how to make healer gameplay worse, it should just focus on how to keep healer gameplay interesting.