Healer Unhappiness exists on the Jap Healing Forums as well.

[tinythinker]

This is ridiculously accurate. When tanks do massive dungeon pulls I don't NEED Temperance or Seraph. Do they make it a bit easier? Yes, but it's not necessary.

I have been through pulls where a wipe was very possible without Temperance - tank in weak gear/trouble using CDs, weak AoE overall, people standing in crap with everything possible pulled all at once. The rest of my OGCDs gone.

*shudder*

A better healer may not need things like Temperance or Seraph in those types of situations, but it makes me feel more comfortable knowing they are there, and there are less skilled/experienced healers than me at level cap.

[MartaDemireux]

I'd like to see monumental changes to the healing jobs so that each healer plays differently, performs equally, and results in a move away from spamming 1 DPS spell.

WHM: Make it a healing-equates-damage-dealing powerhouse.

• Gameplay should focus on using Misery-like abilities as much as possible, using Glare only as filler when you don't have any Lilies to consume. It should feel like your healing/shielding is directly related to or increasing your DPS, with a back-and-forth between using a heal and using a nuke.
• Afflatus Misery via 3 consumed Lilies is a great idea and should improved upon.
• Add a lower potency version of Afflatus Misery (but more potent than Glare) that is triggered after every Lily consumption. Allow it to have up to 3 charges.
• Add an HP shield to the list of Lily consuming abilities.
• Add a Lily consumer on perhaps a 1 minute timer that increases the rate at which your next lily is gained to prevent over-healing and allow triggering of Misery-like skills.
• Have Cure/Cure II/Cure III/Medica/Medica II/Glare contribute toward Lily generation (reducing the time by maybe 5s-10s).

AST: Make it a buffing battery.

• Gameplay should be largely focused around constantly buffing teammates to satisfy the healers that don't want to DPS and create a more true-to-feel support job.
• Reduce nuking potency so that you contribute more rDPS by dealing out cards than you do by nuking.
• Malefic/Gravity/Combust should only be used when cards are fully dealt out.
• Increase card buff potency and perhaps duration.
• The seal collection mechanic is good but should be adjusted to account for the increase of cards being played.
• Put Play on the GCD. If Sleeve Draw is active, Play recast should be reduced.
• Add in more, or buff existing oGCD healing toolkit to make up for Play being on the GCD. For example: begin giving Essential Dignity charges at an earlier level.
• Perhaps give Draw II to pull from a defensively aligned deck and give Divination II to consume seals for an AoE damage reduction buff.
  

SCH: Make it the oGCD healing specialist that feels like a strategic DPS.

• Gameplay should focus on applying DoTs and using your GCD casts for DPS as much as possible. Your oGCDs would be reserved for healing and shielding which includes more meaningful and thematic use of the Fairy.
• Using Aetherflow abilities should once again reduce the timer on Aetherflow.
• All DPS spells should have a shorter cast time, akin to current AST, to better facilitate the use/weaving of Aetherflow and Fairy abilities.
• DPS should have a sort of rotation. Make each cast of Broil burn away (if you will) some of Miasma's and Bio's timers while improving Broil's potency for each DoT active (SMN's old trait). This would result in recasting your DoTs more often instead of pressing Broil all of the time, while not removing any of the DoT's potency should you need to use your GCD to heal or otherwise are unable to cast Broil.
• Bring back Bane for AoE situations but don't have Art of War interact with their timers as attention to tank in AoE pulls is important.
• Aetherflow abilities should still build Fairy Gauge while Dissipation is active.
• Fairy abilities should all use the Fairy Gauge resource and either have no recast timers, or have short recast timers while having at least 2 charges. Aetherpact would need to be given a static cost and duration.
• Consolation (or another AoE shield) should be a standard fairy action.
• Seraph should improve the potency of all Fairy abilities and not lock out any of them. Perhaps she should also allow the use of Fairy abilities without consuming (or consuming less of) the Fairy Gauge.
• I'd almost suggest removing Physick in favor of a stronger potency Embrace to facilitate more DPS casts, but that may be broken.

I'm no game developer and balancing would obviously be tricky, but I really believe each healer should feel very unique even if their actual healing abilities are similar/do the same thing at the end of the day.

[Miminming]

every job unhappiness exist everywhere... even SMN get unhappiness forum rant... ang in JP server currently there's a healer overload, every week every party is waiting for a Dps (which is rare in most patch), so i think healer won't be tgeir priority for a while.

[Allegor]

I have been through pulls where a wipe was very possible without Temperance - tank in weak gear/trouble using CDs, weak AoE overall, people standing in crap with everything possible pulled all at once. The rest of my OGCDs gone.

*shudder*

A better healer may not need things like Temperance or Seraph in those types of situations, but it makes me feel more comfortable knowing they are there, and there are less skilled/experienced healers than me at level cap.

The insult to injury is that Temperance isn't even a 'new' skill at all, it's literally just Largesse given a paint job and returned to WHM...40 levels higher than it used to be.

This may be a risque, if not terrible move, but if the devs want us to spend so much of our time healing rather than DPSing, maybe they should cut our entire healing kit's potency by by a significant amount and see what happens. It's the easier option between it and overhauling how most fights in the game work.

[ty_taurus]

Snip

Wow, this is literally exactly what I've been pitching exactly as you describe it. Healers contributing to rDPS isn't going to go away, but if we redesign how each healer contributes to it, we'll get a lot more personality to each healer and have the ability to create healers that cater to both the healers that want to be "green DPS" and those that don't want to DPS at all but buff allies instead.

[AnotherPerson]

This may be a risque, if not terrible move, but if the devs want us to spend so much of our time healing rather than DPSing, maybe they should cut our entire healing kit's potency by by a significant amount and see what happens. It's the easier option between it and overhauling how most fights in the game work.

Unfortunately, the main issue with nerfing a healer's healing kit is: savage fights that do require an immense amount of healing will have to be reworked + dungeon runs where tanks don't mitigate (and I've seen them in lv 60+ content and it drives me crazy). It simply lowers the ceiling of a healer's capability by letting them only focus on healing.

For something like nerfing a healer's potency significantly, it punishes healers with an undergeared tank, punishes healers because of a tank's lack of usage in mitigations, and punishes the team heavily if the healer dies once (especially in savage). Something like this won't solve the issue of fun for a healer. It just punishes players who are playing optimally and makes it more difficult for players who aren't able to reach this level of healing efficiency.

Healers will have to DPS even if they don't like to if they do solo content. Rather than discourage DPSing, it's better to give different DPS options and support-oriented abilities that can be used in every kind of content - from solo MSQ content to dungeons, and to raiding. It lets those who can preform at an optimal level of healing be allowed to contribute more to their role.

DoTs, Support abilities (which healers should really get for those who don't want a heavy DPS focus healing job), and Flat damage abilites are good because it can be used on any kind of content.

rDPS is quite finnicky because it's solely based on raiding DPS, and not everyone play savage content. The effects are less pronounced in 4-player dungeons than 8-player content. However too weak/complex of an effect and only making a job with rDPS will invariably lead to what AST's card system currently is. In the end, the variability of useful 'options' is what lets a player have fun because it raises the limit cap of a job's functionality.

[Claire_Pendragon]

Im still confused why the dev team made SCH the "Barrier" healer, and WHM the "Regen" healer.
WHM is literally the classic barrier healer of FFs, and only in games w/o time mage, are WHMs the regen healer. (Otherwise its a time mage ability. and if they wanted AST to be a pseudo Time mage, it should have been a Regen focused healer, which aligns well with a fairy, acting as a pseudo regen for SCH. but thats just me complaining again about jobs getting identiy abilities from other jobs, before they were introduced.)
2.0 WAR was the healer tank instead of PLD.
DRK gets living dead, but GNB gets an ability to eat HP. (DRK being the squishier/dangerous melee in FFs should also have been given WARs tank stance, not WAR, since WAR is a combination of the Knight job and Berserker job, where berserkers have had native passive % mitigation, like a constant tank stance, in prior FFs)
making CNJ, the "users of natures elements" class, the white mage job. (also using BLU mage elements, when in games with BLU, WHM wouldnt use aero, stone, or water spells, as they were dedicated to BLUs in said games) but the holy/unholy clergy styled class THM was given BLM, removing its holy magic, and saying the 3 base BLM elements were tied to darkness...
2.0 BLM known for stong burst single target dmg, and medium AoE dmg in FFs was given the best burst AoE, while 2.0 SMN known for the best burst AoE dmg, was given dots and blizzard2 for AoE...
Casters LB being comet/meteors, when its a Time Mage identity. (Coulda been ASTs single targe/AoE nukes)
Tanks had the LB named on BLUs famous defensive spell.
SCH uses poisons and evil miasma, while also curing ouchies with cute fairies... the dots could have been for another job (at least could have been given to DRK) and the fairy is an odd touch, but im not writing a long story into this part lol.
But yeah, im just ranting, and everyone gets the point.

[elioaiko]

This may be a risque, if not terrible move, but if the devs want us to spend so much of our time healing rather than DPSing, maybe they should cut our entire healing kit's potency by by a significant amount and see what happens. It's the easier option between it and overhauling how most fights in the game work.

While FFXIV healers are very strong in terms of raw GCD healing and some may say it's too powerful, making their GCD isn't solving the problem.

Past the balance issues, the thing healers are struggling with now is the gameplay. Healers have become boring. Their DPS rotations have become one button with a DoT. This is because SE wanted healers not to DPS less but for healers to have less to focus on while healing. They want new healers to join in the community and have an easier time to get used to the healer kits by lowering the skill ceiling. Bad healers will complain about wanting to just heal and garbage people will tell a new/old healer to just healbot cause they think that's how healers are. Ofc SE wants to more healing more accessible to new players but the reality is that healing and tanking will always have responsibility and ppl new people are scared of that and will play the more fun DPS role.

The issue is that regardless, healers will need to DPS once a fight is memorized and boom less GCD healing done. And changing the encounter design is something SE will never do. They are far into the game's life cycle to switch over to something that could break other parts of the game and that will lead to more complaints.

Personally, they need to embrace what they have now and work their way up. By 6.0 they will either sit down and really think about how to fix healers once and add the final healer to the game or fail again and not another healer. The latter being a bit more realistic due to their radio silence on the matter.

[Allegor]

I was lowkey being sarcastic, hence starting with that proposal being a bad call lol.

But yeah, overall healers are treated as second class citizens. In SE's eyes we're not a role people willingly chose to play but the role that simply has to exist to make sure tanks and DPS survive a fight long enough - we're not players, we're plot devices ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It'd be interesting if Cleric Stance came back but worked kinda like old tank stances used to, and change GCD spells into offensive abilities while in that stance, like say, Cure II is turned into a nuke and Medica either becomes Holy or turns into a ranged version of it. It may be a lot of extra coding but it's one way to increase our kit without causing button bloat. DNC and NIN already have many buttons that turn into other actions given A or B condition, I don't see why healers couldn't be given the same treatment.

[KDSilver]

IIt'd be interesting if Cleric Stance came back but worked kinda like old tank stances used to, and change GCD spells into offensive abilities while in that stance, like say, Cure II is turned into a nuke and Medica either becomes Holy or turns into a ranged version of it. It may be a lot of extra coding but it's one way to increase our kit without causing button bloat.

That's what I'd personnaly like to see. Preventing button bloat and reintroducing some dps spells without cutting current healing toolkit.
But that's just something in my head. With how the comminity is, how the devs consider healer in general, I know that'll never happen in the game history.