healers need a serious overhaul

[RyuDragnier]

The golden question is how do you increase the role responsibility for all roles without drastically increasing the challenge of content and not making it where one role is significantly harder than another one?

Add more bosses like Cúchulainn where there's a constant DoT on the party that's manageable with HoTs, but still chips away more than the HoTs can heal for. Add in mobs that strengthen the DoT's effect (not by a lot) that DPS need to get rid of ASAP, and you've pretty much increased the challenge of content without overdoing it.

[HyoMinPark]

Is that one upgrade each in that order and then another round, or do you aim to fully gear one person before giving upgrades to the next? The former makes sense, but the latter would feel unfair to me. It's your static of course, but if I joined a static and found out I have to wait months before being allowed to get any loot I probably wouldn't stay with them. I know there's also the book drops everyone gets, but it takes a while to get any gear with those.

It is a priority based on BiS sets. And no, we don’t funnel all gear into one DPS first. For example, if the MNK, SAM, and NIN all needed head piece, gloves, and pants, we would do upgrades like: MNK/SAM gets pants, RDM gets head, and NIN gets gloves. Each one would get something. It’s not a matter of waiting months. I’ve actually already got near full BiS minus the stuff from E12S. I’ll get my last ring this week since the NIN and I both needed all Savage accessories and alternated drops each week. They also prioritized jobs that needed specific pieces to fix skill speed/spell speed issues. So like our NIN got a drop week 1 to combat his high skill speed.

The twines and glazes go to whomever can use them that week. Even tanks and healers. At this point, though, I think we’re doing /random for them. I personally don’t need any more for DNC, so the ones I get are all for healer gear, since it’s my secondary.

[ForteNightshade]

Its a very difficult spot for devs. If you increase the amount of raidwide damage you increase the stress on the average healer. However if you make the dps rotation of healer more complex you also put more stress on the average healer due to the current way content is made.

The golden question is how do you increase the role responsibility for all roles without drastically increasing the challenge of content and not making it where one role is significantly harder than another one?

I know in other games they give out more raid wide damage but most classes have self/party mitigation. Then you have the question is square willing to make a drastic change to healing in where it changes the normal of content?

There comes a point where too much coddling and "accessibility" becomes more of a hindrance. I strongly feel FFXIV has sailed past that point wherein the dev team has grown far too afraid of challenging players. Now, of course, you don't want Normal mode or 24-mans to be a giant wall, but the goal should be to make each role feel important. Currently, only one does. Tanks have so much mitigation and bosses do so little damage, you're essentially a gimped DPS who takes a big hit every once in a while. Case in point, I literally stand in every single mechanic E10 has where I should disengage. Why? Not only are his busters so infrequent I can throw CDs up for eating said AoEs, they don't even kill a DPS let alone a tank. So why dodge? The vuln stack means nothing since, again, I take so little damage throughout the fight.

Healers suffer in a similar way. I've mentioned earlier that I often don't heal at all in E12 because there's so little outgoing damage two healers aren't necessary.

So we now have two roles who essentially function as weaker DPS more often than their dedicated roles. Significantly more, in fact. All because the devs are too afraid inexperienced players may struggle. At least tanks have something of a rotation to fall back on, though it isn't much of one. Healers? They get to spam Glare/Broil/Malefic.

[Packetdancer]

A lot of healers panic and throw out instant heals gcd after gcd everytime a raidwide comes out instead of letting their regens or bubbles do their work. Not saying to only use regens, but if you don't let your regens tick then you're effectively not using a part of your kit, and when you have 2 healers using regens then there's literally nothing to worry about unless the boss is casting some sort of high damage raidwide everyone needs to be topped off for.

And healers who prefer to heal instantly can affect the other healer. If my co-healer is going to predominantly heal everything right away, I'm going to probably start healing less; if all my regen healing ends up being overheal, I might as well save the resources for later and focus on damage. I'll never stop healing entirely, but if I know the next unavoidable raidwide damage happens in like 18s, I'll probably use regen healing to top folks up (save the tank, who, y'know, will be taking other damage between those). If my co-healer is going to slam out two instant heals, though, my regen is just wasted energy; I'll focus on supporting the tank and save the resources for later.

Obviously, I keep healing. But I'd be lying if I said that seeing my co-healer insta-healing everything didn't make me adjust and heal less in that encounter, as opposed to just generating pointless overheal.

[Packetdancer]

+ the general rule that applies to EVERY static I have seen when it comes to loot priority.... DPS -> tank -> heals

Okay, I admit, this standard annoys me a little bit. With so little of the healer BiS this tier being Augmented Cryptlurker except the accessories, it means gear progression is very slow; once I've gotten all my Cryptlurker stuff (which, being mostly accessories, doesn't take long), I just have to wait and get one piece of gear every ~4 weeks or whatever with books, because I haven't yet been able to roll on any gear yet due to loot priorities. Even if I understand the logic behind gear priority, that can feel a little disheartening at times. Like "Well, I'm still in the same gear I was in two weeks ago. I feel like I've achieved nothing."

(Some friends' statics actually swapped the order of loot priority this tier due to the damage levels on E11S and E12S, where they went DPS -> healer -> tank instead. And I've had a few tank friends like "This sucks. I'm not getting gear while everyone else does! I feel like I'm stuck or falling behind, even when we're clearing!" and a small part of me is like "Welcome to the background radiation of a healer main's life, my friend.")

But that's somewhat tangential to healer design overall.

[Liam_Harper]

Add more bosses like Cúchulainn where there's a constant DoT on the party that's manageable with HoTs, but still chips away more than the HoTs can heal for. Add in mobs that strengthen the DoT's effect (not by a lot) that DPS need to get rid of ASAP, and you've pretty much increased the challenge of content without overdoing it.

It's probably not that simple. A higher frequency of damage would be a great start, the 30-60+ second intervals where we barely need to heal are far too lenient, but more damage intake would not be the magical fix.

-For a start, there's a massive difference between a group of average players near minimum ilv progging a fight and a team of skilled players in BiS, mapping cooldowns and mitigation and coordinating heals. Gear, heal mapping, coordination, mitigation all drastically reduce healing needed when combined together. But while fights shouldn't be braindead-easy, Enix would still have to make sure they are possible for average players who have the basics right. It's difficult to design fights that are possible to clear for normal players but still challenging for the skilled group in BiS.
-Secondly, group composition is very rigid. In a game like WoW, you have 20 players in Mythic and up to 30 in Normal/Heroic and they can be flexible with their healers, bringing more when learning a fight and cutting down when geared and knowing the mechanics. In ff14 we always have 2 healers and mechanics often even try to force this. Two is a difficult number to balance for, since one healer dying or incompetent is half your healers gone.
-Third the game plays slowly. 2.5 sec GCD's, animation delays, clipping, server ticks and so on make it hard to design random reactive fast-paced healing, or gameplay in general. Thus mechanics in FF14 are generally quite scripted and predictable.

Personally I feel the current design of healers is the right direction and they should simply embrace the Battle Medic concept instead of considering reworks that can't work or trying to make "pure healers". To create healers that heal-spam the entire game engine and encounter design needs a major rework and that's not realistic. There will always be downtime in ff14 encounters. The very nature and design of the fights and the benefits gear, mitigation and proper planning provide ensure this.
Dps is actually the best downtime filler by far. Buffs or debuffs work well too and have a place, but have set durations or CD's, while DPS is always useful to the team, flows well and can be used the entire fight at any free moment healing isn't needed.

Embracing battle medic as a design could involve increasing the frequency of incoming damage (we're primarily Healers after all), making the dps kit more engaging and rewarding and treating healer damage as actual flowing dps that works with the toolkit (not against it), like tanks, which means no more clipping, ghosting, immobility, unnecessarily high taxes, lack of weave windows and so on, so it feels smooth to play. Also Piety could at the least get the Tenacity treatment and increase damage too.

Just my opinion on the matter.

Yeah but let's be real here. Most people by far only look at the player's summary page which shows percentile of DPS with no details.

Source?

It's your static of course, but if I joined a static and found out I have to wait months before being allowed to get any loot I probably wouldn't stay with them. I know there's also the book drops everyone gets, but it takes a while to get any gear with those.

I feel statics should be about having a team mindset, rather than gaining loot for personal benefit. The only purpose Savage loot really serves is to reclear faster, prog faster and to parse higher. If your reason for quitting a static is "I want to be able to get a marginally higher parse a few weeks sooner to show off" then you aren't really fit for a static. It doesn't take months to reach your turn anyway, the whole group will be geared just as fast, if not faster, than if it was free-for-all".

[AdamFyi]

They should not be confronted by recruiters about their damage output (unless their applying for the very very top/profesional FC's or MLG companies(maybe a little!)...

Recruiters have to set a standard they wish to look for that works for their group. If they don’t see someone as desirable because they’re not performing at the standard the group is looking for, the group has the right to refuse.

prioritizing DIRECT HIT over Mana regen is a clear indicator that the healer design in this game needs to change...

I feel like there’s more of a push to drop Piety for more Determination tbh. I see Det being pushed as the end-all stat, but the boost to healing and dps is extremely minuscule (like ~0.55% at 2000 vs 2800). The increase makes sense on a DPS where they dish out larger damage numbers, but isn’t as heavily weighted on healers with smaller damage and healing numbers.

Regardless, the general rule for midcore raiders is to always go for the amount of Piety until comfortable first. If you notice you’re overcapping on MP, switch that Piety around for other stats.

No surprise, when I applied to static groups a few months later... everyone said i was a crap healer and needed to work on my damage rotation!?!?

There is a website that people use to analyse their logs to see where they can improve. The Statics you applied to probably plugged in your recorded clears into that website to check your performance since it’s fairly reliable. I’d say look that website up and see for yourself. Not sure if I can actually namedrop it, but search using that bolded word. It definitely helps if you’re seeking to improve but want a more tangible list of what you can do to get better at your role.

[tdb]

I feel statics should be about having a team mindset, rather than gaining loot for personal benefit. The only purpose Savage loot really serves is to reclear faster, prog faster and to parse higher. If your reason for quitting a static is "I want to be able to get a marginally higher parse a few weeks sooner to show off" then you aren't really fit for a static. It doesn't take months to reach your turn anyway, the whole group will be geared just as fast, if not faster, than if it was free-for-all".

It's not about getting a higher parse, it's about being appreciated as a member of the team. It's fine if the DPS get the first pick each week. But if the DPS get all loot until they're fully geared, then the tanks, before healers are finally allowed to get something, that makes me feel like a third-rate citizen as a healer.

It's a bit hard to find information on how the loot drops work. Most clear videos cut off just before the chests are opened and guide videos usually don't show the ending at all. From the ones that did include loot it seems that 2-3 gear coffers are dropped per stage, and some also drop a Cryptlurker upgrade item and/or a special tomestone for the weapon. The total amount from all stages seems about enough for fully gearing one character, so depending on how the distribution of coffers matches gear slots, worst case is that a healer would need to wait six weeks from the start of the tier before getting any loot.

[Cirque-it]

It sounds like to me that you attempted to join statics that were not on the same page as yourself with regards to static goals. There are plenty out there that don’t care about The Website That Shall Not Be Named or parsing in general.

nononono you're missing the point.... I have nothing against meter whoring itself.. I just dont want to be a part of it. thats why I play healers... Its fine to have meter whoring... for people who play DPS. The healers and tanks should be concerned with with keeping their "friends" alive... let the DPS worry about the "Web Site that shall not be names"

[Cirque-it]

There is a website that people use to analyse their logs to see where they can improve.

I know the site. and I dont like it, because again it ONLY talks about damage uptime. it doesnt mention anything about "better healing or tanking"