Has anyone quit healing?

[Deceptus]

The community groupthink that you must always be dpsing if you're not healing really turned me away from healing in this game mid-leveling. I just wanna heal, if that's going to be an issue for others I'd just rather not heal at all and play something like a tank or a dps.

I understand you want to only heal but that's simply not the way this game was designed. It specifically tells you multiple times in healing quests that when people are healthy to throw out some damage spells.

You ignoring you what the game tells you to do as well as your complete ability suite / skill set is a bad thing.

[elioaiko]

The community groupthink that you must always be dpsing if you're not healing really turned me away from healing in this game mid-leveling. I just wanna heal, if that's going to be an issue for others I'd just rather not heal at all and play something like a tank or a dps.

I think the issue is that people compare healers in this game to other games like WoW which have completely different philosophies on what is healing. While SE does want that pure healer aesthetic that WoW has, there's little to heal and that's the fault of how they design the fights. As long as there's predictable damage, you can minimize your GCD healing and DPS away.

I also never really understood the whole "just wanting to heal" thing either as I find it to be pretty one-noted and SE will never ask the casual to stress out with healing so much, which is why they'll never raise the amount of damage a party takes for most content. Not to knock on what you want because that's okay if you want to just heal, but FFXIV's healers will never be more than they are now: glorified dps with healing oGCDs.

[Saefinn]

Relevant. (Pick 5 had a literal noose in it so I decided to blur that thing out)

I work as a developer (not games though) and that is unbelievably relatable.

The community groupthink that you must always be dpsing if you're not healing really turned me away from healing in this game mid-leveling. I just wanna heal, if that's going to be an issue for others I'd just rather not heal at all and play something like a tank or a dps.

I say, as long as you are doing something, then it's fine, but chances are ones you are used to healing in this game more and are more efficient at it, you will find there's this big chunk you've got to fill with stuff that's not healing spells. This is just how the game is designed and it is not the same as all MMO's in this regard when it comes to healing, rDPS is how this game measures people performance and their effectiveness. So the reason why people are so obsessed with DPS is purely down to how this game is designed. It works great for some people and many of us like how they designed the game here, but is not for everybody. They can do things to alleviate the DPS headache if a complex rotation doesn't do it for you. IMO they should have made a new healer with a simple rotation to accommodate such people. Sure they would still be expected to DPS, but it'd be a lot more manageable. Instead, they've basically done it to all healer jobs. Heck, even the, if you are on a healer job with a more complicate DPS rotation, you don't have to be efficient at it until like really high content anyway.


But most of the obsession here comes from simply not wanting to be bored during down time and a better DPS rotation is the simplest solution that respects the game's design.

[Gravagar]

The community groupthink that you must always be dpsing if you're not healing really turned me away from healing in this game mid-leveling. I just wanna heal, if that's going to be an issue for others I'd just rather not heal at all and play something like a tank or a dps.

A few others already pointed this out, but: it sounds like you're trying to say "if this groupthink wasn't saying 'deeps deeps deeps', then I would just heal all the time, humbug." But... Even in Savage endgame fights, you have 30-60s stretches of time with little-to-no outgoing damage. What are you going to do when there's no healing, pull open your phone and play solitaire? We advise healers to do damage in such time periods, because it is the only meaningful action we can take to contribute to our group's success.


You understand it, though, and you've made an educated guess that it isn't for you. That's totally fine and reasonable, just, you know, this is what we're dealing with- we'd rather contribute damage during the parts of the encounter designed to let us contribute damage. And we'd rather those moments be more interesting than every healer being Mister Two-Click Rick.

[Veis_Alveare]

The community groupthink that you must always be dpsing if you're not healing really turned me away from healing in this game mid-leveling. I just wanna heal, if that's going to be an issue for others I'd just rather not heal at all and play something like a tank or a dps.

I mean... it's the same principles though?

The goal is to be actively doing something to help the group. No matter the role you're on you should just be keeping your GCD rolling. As a healer that means that some if the time will be spent on damage dealing, just a smaller percentage than as a dps or tank.

If you have some sort of fundamental issue with healers doing damage that's one thing but if you don't make an effort to maintain a baseline of productive activity you won't be succeeding at any job.

[Crushnight]

The community groupthink that you must always be dpsing if you're not healing really turned me away from healing in this game mid-leveling. I just wanna heal, if that's going to be an issue for others I'd just rather not heal at all and play something like a tank or a dps.

Current job design and content design disagree with pure healers being a thing ever now.

They set out for ShB for healers to have a more healing focus.

What they did was;
-remove all healing up on healers except fey illumination pre ShB content
-stripped dps tools down to as bare bones as possible
-added more healing tools mostly new ogcds with a few gcd interactions (Lillies, Recitation,Horoscope,Neutral Sect)
-Lillies get a more straightforward, easier to use system(anything was better than SB lillies tbf)
-Fairy got weakened again, pet interaction is removed(no manual embrace etc), added an upgraded fairy with ghosting issues
-Ast card system revamped to be pure dps

So what happened?
-Content design did not change across the board
-this lead to healers having more healing tools for the same situations
-this leads to healer downtime increasing
-this increase in downtime is felt much further down the skill ladder than it ever has been before

We are dpsing more this expansion than any previous expansion before it.

Their design philosophy backfired spectacularly because they clung to one thing.

Accessibility.

They want healers as accessible as possible, they want content to be as accessible as possible, they cannot make a healing focus healer design work because they want both to be accessible as possible.


The more things are made accessible the more demanding the playerbase is going to be towards other players. Pure healers needed there to be a high skill ceiling to be able to hide and get away with it, as the more daunting a task is the less likely people expect you to do it. The healer skill ceiling is so low atm pure healers stick out like a Simpsons character in a field of snow.

[Maltothoris]

The community groupthink that you must always be dpsing if you're not healing really turned me away from healing in this game mid-leveling. I just wanna heal, if that's going to be an issue for others I'd just rather not heal at all and play something like a tank or a dps.

Here's an example of how the encounter design leads to the weakness of how healers are atm.

https://preview.redd.it/fo9bwgrcfdo4...=webp&8264f340

Here is the Shiva which is e8s. The damage burst as so spread out that they can be taken with ogcds and that easily 11 minutes of the 14 minute fight can just used dpsing with the only healing intensive part being the final part of akh morn/ morn afah spams at the end. And this isn't the exception. All fights follow this pattern of big burst damage followed by a lengthy amount of downtime which we can assume the devs mean for the healers to rest but a good group can turn that downtime into something huge by having healers dps there and help get the boss to be even lower.

Edot: And as others have noted, you are rewarded more for dps than you are for healing. More dps means faster clears, more dps means you can do fights on farm faster so you can the loot faster. More dps means faster kill time and thus you don't need to do deal with mechanics that you think are annoying. (Last set of tethers in e6s, the last 3 graces in e7s, the last chain lightning in e5s, and the last set of akh morns/ morn afah. There's huge incentive to dps for healers, not so much for healers to just heal

[ForteNightshade]

A few others already pointed this out, but: it sounds like you're trying to say "if this groupthink wasn't saying 'deeps deeps deeps', then I would just heal all the time, humbug." But... Even in Savage endgame fights, you have 30-60s stretches of time with little-to-no outgoing damage. What are you going to do when there's no healing, pull open your phone and play solitaire? We advise healers to do damage in such time periods, because it is the only meaningful action we can take to contribute to our group's success.


You understand it, though, and you've made an educated guess that it isn't for you. That's totally fine and reasonable, just, you know, this is what we're dealing with- we'd rather contribute damage during the parts of the encounter designed to let us contribute damage. And we'd rather those moments be more interesting than every healer being Mister Two-Click Rick.

Case in point, I only had to bother healing extensively E8N because my co-healer had little to no idea what she was doing. Otherwise, whenever I heal that fight, I spend like 90% doing nothing but spam Glare. The fight simply doesn't demand consistent healing from two healers. Dungeons are even worse. It's rather sad I had more fun healing Anamnesis Anyder's first boss (the weird thing) when the tank left. Why? The DPS actually took enough damage, especially since the RDM was tanking, I actually needed to think about my heals and focus on them. Sure, part of that has to do with me not expecting it but it certainly was a nice change of pace from the standard tank damage that is so laughable I hardly notice it budge.

[Deceptus]

Here's an example of how the encounter design leads to the weakness of how healers are atm.

https://preview.redd.it/fo9bwgrcfdo4...=webp&8264f340

Here is the Shiva which is e8s. The damage burst as so spread out that they can be taken with ogcds and that easily 11 minutes of the 14 minute fight can just used dpsing with the only healing intensive part being the final part of akh morn/ morn afah spams at the end. And this isn't the exception. All fights follow this pattern of big burst damage followed by a lengthy amount of downtime which we can assume the devs mean for the healers to rest but a good group can turn that downtime into something huge by having healers dps there and help get the boss to be even lower.

Edot: And as others have noted, you are rewarded more for dps than you are for healing. More dps means faster clears, more dps means you can do fights on farm faster so you can the loot faster. More dps means faster kill time and thus you don't need to do deal with mechanics that you think are annoying. (Last set of tethers in e6s, the last 3 graces in e7s, the last chain lightning in e5s, and the last set of akh morns/ morn afah. There's huge incentive to dps for healers, not so much for healers to just heal

Your link is bad, I think you wanted

[Billythepancake]

Here's an example of how the encounter design leads to the weakness of how healers are atm.

https://preview.redd.it/fo9bwgrcfdo4...=webp&8264f340

Here is the Shiva which is e8s. The damage burst as so spread out that they can be taken with ogcds and that easily 11 minutes of the 14 minute fight can just used dpsing with the only healing intensive part being the final part of akh morn/ morn afah spams at the end. And this isn't the exception. All fights follow this pattern of big burst damage followed by a lengthy amount of downtime which we can assume the devs mean for the healers to rest but a good group can turn that downtime into something huge by having healers dps there and help get the boss to be even lower.

Edot: And as others have noted, you are rewarded more for dps than you are for healing. More dps means faster clears, more dps means you can do fights on farm faster so you can the loot faster. More dps means faster kill time and thus you don't need to do deal with mechanics that you think are annoying. (Last set of tethers in e6s, the last 3 graces in e7s, the last chain lightning in e5s, and the last set of akh morns/ morn afah. There's huge incentive to dps for healers, not so much for healers to just heal

There's simply no way the devs intended for healers to "rest" during those moments. E8s, even with full bis and with the 4 best DPS and 2 best tanks in the world is flat out impossible if you don't have your healers DPS. DPSing on that fight is not an option you HAVE to do it, and unlike a lot of people on these forums, I don't think that's a bad thing in the slightest. I LOVE that healers DPS, I think that's great design, I think healers SHOULD deal damage, they're on the front lines with everyone else, why wouldn't they contribute to damage? A combat medic knows the best way to heal is to make sure your men don't get hurt in the first place, and the best way to do that? Kill the person trying to hurt them. That's why they're given guns along with the other soldiers.

My biggest gripe is that I feel punished for doing my job well, I feel like the game is telling me "you've wasted your time" when I learned how to be good at my class, because instead of being able to use more of my kit, I'm only spamming 1 button. I'm not even asking for a full blown rotation, just give me like 2-3 dots all with different timers, a self buff to watch and time, and maybe a DPS CD or two. That's it. If they just gave SCH's DPS kit back that they had in SB I'd be happy with SCH, from the DPS angle anyway, they still need to fix that mess of a fairy WHICH WAS PERFECT IN SB, god, I don't understand that change in the slightest. "hey guys, let's have fairy on SCH, but, instead of it being an incredibly useful and responsive tool in their kit, what if instead of that, we just made it completely worthless? People will LOVE that!"