Final Fantasy XIV’s healer problem and how it’s kind of unsolvable

[Saefinn]

I am glad they are a media acknowledging there are problems with healers and draw attention to the complaints and in that sense are publicising a problem. But I don't agree with their conclusion and I think there are points they misunderstand or overstate as an issue.

From reading, they dismiss the easiest solution with this:

The reason I noted this was kind of unsolvable is that… you can move the needle, but the same problems are still there. Increasing incoming damage more to force healers to heal more is not permanent; creating more elaborate DPS rotations takes the focus off of healing and encourages worse healers to cause larger problems. You nudge things, but you always are nudging things.

This I feel is a non-argument. A few points:

• Was it ever *THAT* big of a problem? In my experience, it never has been. You once in a while got unlucky, big deal, people are new, are learning, make mistakes and so on. It's a learning experience. And sometimes people just aren't very good, which is gonna happen, but we should focus on helping them instead of sucking the fun out of things to make them too easy
• Risk/Reward can be a part of the fun
• It hasn't solved the problem
• Sometimes healers just make mistakes. Still happens, I've done it with our super dumbed down rotation, but the complexity of the rotation wasn't the issue, it was misjudging how much DPS I could get in. EG: your tank might be undergear or not using cooldowns and you've misjudged how quickly their HP is dropping. No matter how dumbed down your DPS is, it's not going to prevent that from happening.
• If there is a problem, making it easier for people to overcome the problem is surely better than dumbing it down (as evidenced, the complexity of a DPS rotation is not the only reason it happens). Expand the Hall of the Novice if they must, training on managing healing & DPS and prioritising healing. I also put forth the idea of a Training Log, mixing the two, could be good way of going "this is what you should practice" and "here's a dungeon to queue to practice it".
• If there are people who find this aspect too hard to deal with, a 4th healer with a dumbed down DPS would have accommodated for those people

The premise of the article I think is wrong, it is solvable. Just something will have to 'give' in order to solve it.

A more complex (and not even a heavily complex) DPS rotation in their downtime is the easiest and least offensive solution that causes the least disruption whilst respecting this game's design.

However that paragraph is followed by this:

We were told at the start of Shadowbringers that, functionally, healer changes were aiming at healers being meant to heal. That makes sense because it helps bring all three of the healers into the same basic space in terms of how they are designed. Before diversifying further, you want to bring basic efficiency into a comprehensible baseline and get everyone accustomed to what the “core” toolkit is meant to be.

This is a fallacy. Whilst I can maybe understand to a degree a more complex rotation might have some players focusing on completing their rotation and mistakenly miss their heal trying to squeeze it out.

But it is here I think they show they misunderstand the problem, in RE to the aim of making healers being meant to heal and people becoming accustomed to that core kit. Scrapping or keeping a DPS kit affects nothing about how they design our healing kit.

Shadowbringers does nothing to bring more of a healing focus. This is a misconception I keep seeing thrown around. I can explain why it is wrong.

For demonstration purposes, let's make a few assumptions (all numbers are made up for the sake of illustration of the principle of how it works and not accuracy and it's late, so not gonna be a pedant):
For a typical dungeon:
60% of my downtime is filled with: 8 DPS spells I have some rotation on, such as Broil, Miasma, Miasma II, Bio, Bio II, Ruin II, Shadowflare, Bane
40% of my downtime is filled with: 8 healing spells, such as Adlo, Indom, Lustrate, Succor, Physick, Whispering Dawn, Excog, Fey Union

We look at the problem and think, "there's too much of a DPS focus" here. What number should we focus on?

We'd want to lower the 60% and increase the 40%. To then tip the scales to be less of a DPS focus and more of a healing focus. What affects it? Two things. What the content requires in terms of healing and the tools you have to manage it. Your DPS rotation is not a part of that equation, why? Because your primary focus is healing.

However, what ShB did was more like this:
Reduce the 8 DPS spells down to 3.
Increase the 8 healing spells to 15

And then it looks like "we now have much less of a DPS focus." But if we assumed that then we're looking at the wrong numbers.

What it actually means is:
60% of our downtime is: Broil, Ruin II, Biolysis
40% of our downtime is: those 15 healing spells

Therefore it did nothing to address this balance.
The change means there's more at our disposal at the 40%, but the 60% is a lot less interesting.

But taking that one step further. By adding more healing spells and thus increasing healing efficiency, there is another knock-on effect here. Actually, there are two:

The 60% is now 70% and the 40% is now 30%. Meaning, we have more of a DPS focus and less of a healing one.

This is because very little of the content out there has been adjusted to accommodate for the fact we have this extra healing efficiency.

It also means, that much of those 15 healing spells end up as bloat and are under-used for a lot of content, because you have plenty at your disposal to accommodate that 30% up time without any need to use them to their potential. Because it's not like a DPS rotation where you're rotation through your different abilities but using only what's needed to get health up. So what does that mean? It means that 30% doesn't feel so engaging either.

To me that's what the healing changes mean and feel like in a nutshell. I feel like I have less of a healer focus than I used to whilst also having much less to do when I am not healing.

By a weird twist of fate, the healing job I found with the highest healing focus is Blue Mage (with a healer stance) with ~4 healing spells and a butt load of DPS ones, because Blue Mage is less efficient at healing...and Blue Mage tanks are also less efficient at mitigating damage than real ones.

[Edit]

And taking one step further. Those of us advocating more of a complex DPS rotation would be proposing this:
Accept that the downtime is a thing and the steps needed to address it would be too complicated.
So they would be saying the 60%/40% balance is just what it is for much of the game's content.
Then for newer content (possibly higher content if they want to keep progression beginner friendly), if more healing focus is wanted, then use the challenge of the content to push that balance in favour of healing, eg: 30% DPS, 70% heal. Encounter design would be what'd drive that.
But people get better, get better gear etc. and that 30/70 weighs more in favour of DPS, or for content when DPS is already more heavily weighted.
For during that time of DPS focus, bring our DPS skills back up to 8 again, or heck, be adventurous, make it 10.