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

[MirronTulaxia]

I think this subject is unsolvable on the whole as it’s the healer player base that’s essentially split.

You have the one side that wants the role of a pure support/healing class and though this game has healing roles that certainly appear to play like that it’s the attitude of the player base that dictates otherwise. It has been said from a long time ago that all content in this game, bar ultimate, isn’t tuned to account for healer dps levels. Now yes it makes the fight go faster, but ultimately that doesn’t make it more fun does it? It’s the attitude of the party doing the content. And this actual argument is one of the core issues that has now accounted for the current healer hotbar, less dps spells and more healing spells.
If players were a little more patient in general dungeons and allowed healers to learn at their own pace to heal and mix dps rather than, in a lot of what I saw, bark and complain of they didn’t reach their parse we prob wouldn’t be at this point.

You also have the other side of the argument that wants more of a pure dps rotation put into the healers because as they have less to heal they wanna dps more, or be the Uber combat mage that can do it all! Effectively a rdm with a few more healing spells and that quicker queue time.

So in essence SE can only really go one way and ultimately alienate half their healer player base, and essentially what the article was getting at.

The only other way I can see it for 6.0 is now they have a core healing and dps kit of all the jobs they should branch out one in each direction for 6.0.

Make Sch a higher dos healer that can utilise more of smn toolkit. And maybe make Selene a dps fairy.

Make ast your support healer that goes a bit further than it does already.

Make whm your pure healer as it already is. Maybe with banish as well cos I kiss that spell from xi

And then finally make a melee healer that uses auras and aoe healing so aid battle, so geomancer with a hammer.

Essentially with this they can allow the healer community to gravitate to what specific one they want and then SE can tweak and adjust as necessary. I essentially think it would balance out in the long run as not all healers, like everyone else wants to play the same exact way forever do they?.

On top of this they seriously need to change the fight and level design. Lower the item level caps for all the dungeons to make healing a little more proactive and maybe start adding enfeebles and such that healers need to account for and sort. We all have Esuna but who seriously uses it in most content.

My suggestion is open for constructive debate, but let’s keep it civil peeps.

I certainly agree that the issue is that the healer base isn't terribly unified on the matter. I would certainly rather see more healing happen, not less. I think a not insignificant amount of people see healing as more of a side thing than the main focus of the job, and would rather minimize the amount of time they spend healing to do more damage, and so long as that kind of split focus is there I don't think they can really fix the issue.

As far as the proposed solution, the issue with that is you just wind up seeing certain healers alienated in favor of others. In that setup you'd probably see Scholar and one of Geomancer or Astrologian being the preferred model, and White Mages would be dropped. Unrelated but not really wanting to see a melee Geomancer healer with a hammer, just seems kind of clunky/weird. The solution though isn't super workable to me. If you leave the difference up to each model of healer then all that will happen is pushing for a specific subsection of healers (this already happened previously after all).

[Lyth]

This article misses the point. Every role becomes easier when you have more gear. That's part of the design of this game, to pitch the same content to a variety of skill levels. At any given gear level, only a set proportion of the playerbase can clear. That proportion increases as the average gear level goes up. Ultimate fights have a fixed gear level for that reason.

Healer ennui in particular comes from predictable damage, coupled with an overly powerful oGCD healing kit and an overly powerful mitigation kit on the part of tanks. Your tanks mostly take care of themselves, aside from the four times per fight that a *gasp* tankbuster shows up and someone uses an invuln to completely ignore it. And if they mess it up, the replacement tank just vokes and one of your five party members with a near endless supply of instant cast raises sorts out the issue with minimal consequence. The thing that will cause wipes are raid wides and team jumprope mechanic fails, but it's more the former that's your problem.

But the solution isn't more whack-a-mole, which is quite possibly the only thing more boring than having nothing to heal. I find healing most enjoyable as a concept in PvP games, where damage is extremely unpredictable (and when everyone else is trying to kill you). That's really what you want here. That and maybe make resource management more of a thing.

[Liam_Harper]

Can't say I agree with the article, but it is a very difficult issue to solve because Enix have compounded it by following the same formula of low damage intake in predictable bursts for multiple expansions now.

Making healing more engaging would require reworking the entire game from the ground up. Stronger auto attacks, more frequent raid-wide damage, less aoe tools that can put 8 people from 10% to 100% in 5 seconds. I can't see them doing something major like that. It's not as simple as just nerfing healing or ripping oGcd's from us because we'd still have that same pattern of damage spike then 30 seconds downtime and filling it by spamming Medica 6 times or endless Cure II on the tank for wet noodle heals is going to feel just as tedious.

The other issue is player skill. This varies so widely and for multiple expansions now the game has been designed so that all content below Savage can be cleared even if you play your class completely wrong. Tank busters can just about be taken with no cd's, bosses can be killed with half of max dps and spamming random heals will probably work fine. Enix have ingrained bad habits into the playerbase so deeply that suddenly changing it would result in uproar. Even the fabled pure healers often are terrible at healing efficiently and couldn't handle actual consistent damage intake.

About the best we can get is reverting to HW or SB healing. Anything further than that probably isn't realistic in this game.

[ForteNightshade]

The solution is to make healers more engaging in other ways. They don't need hugely complex DPS toolkits but something as simple as more DoT management or maybe a tank-esque rotation would certainly go a long way. If the dev didn't want to go the damage route, then healers ought to be shifted into a more "Support" styled role. Let them buff, debuff or whatever else to help space out the monotony of Glare/Broil/Malefic spam. Abilities or Spells like Virus, Trick Attack or what have you aren't gamebreaker if absent or poorly managed. So if you do have bad healers that don't manage the whole Support aspect well, it wouldn't be world ending. It would, however, reward more skillful play in a manner suiting the role itself.

It may be a nudge, as the article puts it, but there comes a point where you need to make that nudge because what they're doing now just isn't working.

[Gemina]

I realize that you stated you don't do savage content and couldn't speak on it, and even stated "for the most part" here... but end-game content like savage raids/etc. can't really be overlooked when stating something like this. Because I'm fairly certain healer damage is factored in when it comes to high-end content.

Healer DPS is not factored into DPS checks. Never has been in any content up to savage. Ultimate encounters came out after this statement was made from the dev team, so for those specific instances I am not sure. However, I am quite sure that all DPS from all jobs is factored into raid clears, especially when determining how much HP to give to the boss.

Healer DPS in high-end content is a requirement because we made it so; not because it was designed to be that way. This does not excuse healers going idle, but it is what it is.

[Videra]

Healer DPS is not factored into DPS checks. Never has been in any content up to savage. Ultimate encounters came out after this statement was made from the dev team, so for those specific instances I am not sure. However, I am quite sure that all DPS from all jobs is factored into raid clears, especially when determining how much HP to give to the boss.

Healer DPS in high-end content is a requirement because we made it so; not because it was designed to be that way. This does not excuse healers going idle, but it is what it is.

Week one Shiva Savage was literally impossible to clear without healer DPS, among plenty of other fights. So saying that healer DPS isn't factored into content is objectively a lie. Please, stop flagging around a statement that was made years ago by a man who thought Diadem RNG weapons would be BiS. I love Yoshi-P, but he can and has been very wrong.

[Gemina]

Tunnel vision is not a design issue, it's a player issue. It happens to everyone and it doesn't mean that jobs need to be simplified, only that the player needs more practice. If the devs really want to do something about it they could increase how far we can zoom out but don't take fun out of the game because people who don't even need to worry about the full complexity of their job can't handle it.

It's no different from a dps staring too long at their bars to see what they can use next or focusing so hard on your one little part of the screen you don't see trouble coming from somewhere else. Should all dps and raids be dumbed down to account for these player mistakes? Of course not, and neither should healers. You practice and improve and feel good for it, that's what gaming (life, really) is all about.

I never said tunnel vision is a design issue. Read my posts again, and if I need to clear something up, I am more than happy to. But stop twisting my words around to make your own point. There is no strawman here my friend. If you don't think this is an issue then I invite you to talk to tanks who are still around from 2.x to SB, and ask them how crazy their healers drove them. It's not as bad now, and the removal of Stance Dancing for healers is a big reason why.

Also don't compare tunnel visioning to brain farts from a DPS role. Players don't die when a DPS misses or uses the wrong GCD.

[Gemina]

Week one Shiva Savage was literally impossible to clear without healer DPS, among plenty of other fights. So saying that healer DPS isn't factored into content is objectively a lie. Please, stop flagging around a statement that was made years ago by a man who thought Diadem RNG weapons would be BiS. I love Yoshi-P, but he can and has been very wrong.

Oh god. Ok. here you go:

Addressed in this thread: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/236992

Link to actual interiew: https://www.bluegartr.com/threads/12...-Event-5-19%29

For those who are lazy:

Yoshida: Yes. Since all DPS jobs will be increasing up through level 60, it makes sense to have the white mage's DPS extend by a proportional amount as well. For development, such as with Bahamut's Coils, the development team assumes what the item level should be for general equipment on players when they clear a raid. They sum up the basic DPS for four DPS and tanks at that assumed item level and cut that by about 10-15% for the minimum clear DPS. Healer DPS is not taken into account when this is set.

Certainly for people who are at world's first level, their goal is to clear it at as low an item level as possible, lower than the one assumed during development. So if you look at the fight and figure out that if it's not numerically possible to clear with four DPS and tanks, you'll need to make up the gap with DPS from healers. Then when those publish clear videos and other people see the healers DPSing, they might think that healers need to be DPSing even though its a situation that only arose because their clear would have otherwise been impossible. While we could take this into account, and assume a different item level in the next update which would then make it impossible to clear even with the healer DPS, we'd eliminate this type of play for highly skilled players who use communication, items, and a high level of understanding to come up with those last second clears. That would be a tough decision to make, so I still think it should be up to each party's own plans.

This is also one of the reasons we decided to implement both a normal and savage version of Alexander. Once again, healer DPS was not included in the development team's calculation as it was for other jobs, so you should just think of healer DPS as a last way to get your overall party's DPS up to where it needs to be.

So, unless you want to post official link for a rebuttal that state this has changed, I firmly stand by my statements. Don't EVER call me a liar. You're arguing against a man who is established and proven in his field. You're just a subscriber like the rest of us.

[Videra]

Oh god. Ok. here you go:

Addressed in this thread: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/236992

Link to actual interiew: https://www.bluegartr.com/threads/12...-Event-5-19%29

For those who are lazy:


So, unless you want to post official link for a rebuttal that state this has changed, I firmly stand by my statements. Don't EVER call me a liar. You're arguing against a man who is established and proven in his field. You're just a subscriber like the rest of us.

You're allowed to criticize an artist even if you cannot make the same art he does. Also, you cannot take a statement made in 2015 which has been PROVEN wrong into account for this. Things have changed, and you can quite easily see the fact that healer DPS is factored into content by simply looking at FFLogs. Check any week one Shiva log, and you will plainly see a wealth of information pointing to the simple fact that healer DPS was required. End of.

[Billythepancake]

Oh god. Ok. here you go:

Addressed in this thread: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/236992

Link to actual interiew: https://www.bluegartr.com/threads/12...-Event-5-19%29

For those who are lazy:


So, unless you want to post official link for a rebuttal that state this has changed, I firmly stand by my statements. Don't EVER call me a liar. You're arguing against a man who is established and proven in his field. You're just a subscriber like the rest of us.

I'm aware of the quote, but actual statistics prove it wrong. Maybe back when the quote came out, 5 years ago, it was correct, but it is literally no longer the case. Even in current Shiva, you need around 85-86k rDPS to clear e8s, running with the 4 best DPS and 2 best tanks in the world, all bis, all playing perfectly, you'd be just shy of making that check, you would hit enraged if healers did not DPS. Maybe you would make it if you got super lucky on crits/direct hits/crit direct hits, you might be able to JUST squeak by. There is no conceivable way that the fight was not intended to have healers DPS, regardless of what Yoshi-P says