healers need a serious overhaul

[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".