General Community Resistant to Healer Damage?

[Imakun]

That is what needs to happen to support a more healing/support playstyle 80 levels of content do not need more healing, 80 levels of content do not compliment the current heavy healing focused healer kits (I mean just look at them they are as bare bones on the dps end as can be and healers are bored and unsatisfied), a more healing/support focus cannot work without heavy encounter tweaking and even then it still leaves the issue of well hope you enjoy solo instances with no one to support/heal.

Thing is, the current "healing focused" style of XIV's healer jobs is already not supported. You can take care of any healing with a couple of buttons in any given situation and then just go back to spam Glare/Malefic/Broil.
The current general mentality is "waste as little GCD on healing as possible so you can spam your damage spell".

A healer.. WASTING GCD on healing. See the problem here?

Further edit: The "well then it's gonna get boring with the solo instances" problem. Guess what, it already is. I despise any single player instance I am forced to do as a healer because 99% of them have a grand total of zero healing involved.

As others have already said, the in-game reality is that healers are sparse. Because they're all the same job with different graphical effects AND IT SUCKS.

Give. Healers. Their. Flavor. Back.

The Devs gave us "healing focused healers!" not by creating scenarios and encounters that actually require healing but by upping the number of healing abilities for AST/SCH/WHM and removing everything else. We now have too many healing GCD/oGCD that can also feel clunky to use for no reason (why does Plenary Indulgence work automatically while I have to trigger Horoscope manually? Nobody knows! Properly timing the fairy stuff on Seraph? Good luck with that) and two damage spells that are the exact copy of each other with varying degree of flashiness.

Before ShB, WHM needed help because it was lagging behind AST and SCH a bit. Well, now they all suck. Well done?

[Halivel]

I don't mind healer dpsing and do dps myself when I go anywhere as healer. However, as a tank, a would rather prefer healer doing healing when I need it instead of seeing how my HP is dropping to 150 out of 120300 under a big pull while he's casting his AoE kit. That's what pisses me off - when healer thinks he's a dps and that this is his main job, completely ignoring the fact he actually need to... it may be unbeliveable, but... heal. I prefer going slower but safe instead of wiping endlessly because healer thought that spamming Holy is more important than his tank dying because he thought he will have time to use Benediction on 10 HP moment.

That said, if people pick healer role with a mindset "heal as less as possible and dps as much as possible" - they aren't suitable for this role, despite the fact high end contect asks them to dps on a decent level.

[Enla]

-snip-

In a perfect world I'd say yes without hesitation - assuming that SE had infinite time and money to make this happen. However given that this isn't a perfect world and there are factors that would prohibit such a fundamental overhaul of the entire game, I'd have to say that as much as I highly desire a higher emphasis on healing it's unrealistic to expect every encounter to be changed to suit it. At best all we could really hope for would be a gradual ramping up in healing difficulty over the encounters we're given from now till 6.0 to help train the general player populace to get used to a change in the meta. But even then they really can't change much without running the risk of alienating a lot of people regardless of their roles.

So while I lament the state of healing/support in this game and miss much of the gutted utility, I definitely agree that changing up the DPS meta for healers is the simplest way to fix the current issue. However I also, sadly, don't think SE will even consider doing that. While most healer mains can comfortably heal about 10-20 percent of the time in any encounter the developers seem to be of the opinion that the game we're playing requires much more stringent healing than is actually necessary. I can't tell if they're designing encounters around the least common denominator who legitimately cannot handle even that minimal work load, or if they just fundamentally misunderstand the meta they themselves have put in place. Either way I feel it's going to be an uphill battle to even get concessions on the DPS side of things.

[Billythepancake]

I don't mind healer dpsing and do dps myself when I go anywhere as healer. However, as a tank, a would rather prefer healer doing healing when I need it instead of seeing how my HP is dropping to 150 out of 120300 under a big pull while he's casting his AoE kit. That's what pisses me off - when healer thinks he's a dps and that this is his main job, completely ignoring the fact he actually need to... it may be unbeliveable, but... heal. I prefer going slower but safe instead of wiping endlessly because healer thought that spamming Holy is more important than his tank dying because he thought he will have time to use Benediction on 10 HP moment.

That said, if people pick healer role with a mindset "heal as less as possible and dps as much as possible" - they aren't suitable for this role, despite the fact high end contect asks them to dps on a decent level.

If a healer is truly capable of letting you drop to 150 HP before they heal you, and can do so consistently without letting you die, then they're an amazing healer. A healers job is to keep you alive, keyword: alive. As long as you don't hit 0 due to unavoidable damage, they did the healing part of their job well enough.

[Halivel]

If a healer is truly capable of letting you drop to 150 HP before they heal you, and can do so consistently without letting you die, then they're an amazing healer. A healers job is to keep you alive, keyword: alive. As long as you don't hit 0 due to unavoidable damage, they did the healing part of their job well enough.

Fair, but the main issue is that a lot of healers actually can't keep this or it works 50/50 thanks to factors different than just their skill (like mob hitting a bit earlier than they expected or latency issues). Also if the healer heals me only when my HP is extremely low to the point of raising the question "will I stay alive or not" - I won't accept the whining about Superbolide procking 0.5 second earlier than Benediction/another hard healing skill. Keeping tank alive isn't equal to "give them heart attack on every single pull", especially when we talk about things like roulettes done with random people whose skill in playing I don't know just as they don't know mine. I can completely ignore my HP when I'm with the healer I know because I trust them, but when you're with randoms - trust is a luxury.

[Lersayil]

If a healer is truly capable of letting you drop to 150 HP before they heal you, and can do so consistently without letting you die, then they're an amazing healer. A healers job is to keep you alive, keyword: alive. As long as you don't hit 0 due to unavoidable damage, they did the healing part of their job well enough.

While I completely agree, it does require a measure of trust... uncharacteristic to a pug situation. Even if the healer is truly amazeballs, as a tank the first 10 or so times I drop below 25% my heart will skip at least 2 beats.

[Saefinn]

I found the complaint to be rarer, I get there are those who prefer more healing up time, which is fine, however the big problem is that healer DPS changes fail to address that. Healing focus is not determined by the ratio of healing and DPS spells, but in terms of what the content requires and how the spells handle it. For normal content the most engaged healing experience I've had in ShB was Blue Mage, and that had a very limited healing set and is not as efficient as SCH, AST or WHM and has a butt load of DPS abilities. The fact it was less efficient is why it was more engaging and meant you were more thoughtful about your healing and maybe used some CC to help mitigate damage.

But the game's design gives loads of room for healer DPS, not only that but its design encourages it and I think most accept this. And it is fine, because it doesn't have to do things the way other MMO's do it and in FF titles, it is not uncommon for healer jobs/characters to do more than heal. Having DPS fills the gaps, how engaging or complex that is does not affect healing focus, so i no reason to not have it be engaging.

In a way it is the least offensive way of making healers more engaging, you keep the skill floor low but raise the skill ceiling.

But once in a while we see people dislike healers DPSing, but they are rare. I think the bigger problem is people who focus too much on DPS and forget healing is their primary role and DPS is second.

Then they can determine how much healing focus there is by the content and the difficulty of that content.

[SamRF]

Fair, but the main issue is that a lot of healers actually can't keep this or it works 50/50 thanks to factors different than just their skill (like mob hitting a bit earlier than they expected or latency issues). Also if the healer heals me only when my HP is extremely low to the point of raising the question "will I stay alive or not" - I won't accept the whining about Superbolide procking 0.5 second earlier than Benediction/another hard healing skill. Keeping tank alive isn't equal to "give them heart attack on every single pull", especially when we talk about things like roulettes done with random people whose skill in playing I don't know just as they don't know mine. I can completely ignore my HP when I'm with the healer I know because I trust them, but when you're with randoms - trust is a luxury.

Imo it's only fair to completely trust the healer until they have proven to be untrustworthy by letting you die. 1 death isn't that big of an issue and I'd rather give the healer a chance to have their fun and showcase their skill to fullest extend (in context).

[EaMett]

Imo it's only fair to completely trust the healer until they have proven to be untrustworthy by letting you die. 1 death isn't that big of an issue and I'd rather give the healer a chance to have their fun and showcase their skill to fullest extend (in context).

This. I was about to ask if I was the only one who essentially didn't concern myself too much with my health when tanking, until I die that is.

[Halivel]

Imo it's only fair to completely trust the healer until they have proven to be untrustworthy by letting you die. 1 death isn't that big of an issue and I'd rather give the healer a chance to have their fun and showcase their skill to fullest extend (in context).

Sorry, but in 13 years of playing MMO games I was proven too many times that trusting random people from the start is a bad idea. I won't care if my HP is like 20-30% out of max most of the time, but if I see that it is dangerously near to K.O., I'm not going to sit there thinking "oh maybe he'll heal me now, just a second later" when 8 out of 10 cases lead to the exactly opposite result if I don't use invulnerability skill.

Mind me, situations like this don't happen often to begin with, but when they do - in about 80% of cases the only outcome I see is that blindly trusting random people by default was a mistake. Soooooo nope, thanks, I learned the lesson from... countless mistakes I repeated because I had hope.

I don't mind wipes in general because when I enter the dungeon I'm ready to spend entire 90 minutes there, but I still stay on my opinion regardeless: if healer values dps higher than his party health, he's not suitable for being a healer. That's it. Outside of this, wiping won't make me mad or something, it just will prove that I wasn't wrong in not trusting to a pug (or that I overstimated my own capabilities in some cases as well). And I prefer being proven people were worth the trust and I was tensed for nothing, not the opposite. That said, I prefer being ready for the worst and then being surprised in a good way rather than going in a blind believe that everyone will give their all to be only dissapointed later.